Network problems

[Bill Stanley]

On 12/24/2010 10:30 PM, Lucio M Nicolosi wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 24, 2010 at 2:03 AM, Bill Stanley<bstanle at wowway.com>  wrote:
>
> (I understand that your problem is:)
>
> [ ]
>>   I can't get two Linux machines (both running Ubuntu) to communicate.
>
> [ ]
>
>>   If I am right, samba is not needed but nfs is needed.
>
> I don't think so, if you can ping both machines you can mount remote
> folders, no nfs (or Samba) needed.
>
> What I can't understand is how you can check the open ports across the
> machines but not ping them?
>
> Lucio
>

This is a real interesting (puzzling) problem!  I can send and receive 
pings from one machine but not the other.  Also, I installed samba and I 
looked at the samba logs of both computers.

1. It seems that there is **SOME** communications happening but not 
enough to make a connection.   Although I didn't give the computer name 
of the other computer to either computer, I can see in the logs the name 
of the other computer.  This wouldn't happen if there was no 
communications.

2. The computer that accepts and gives pings tries to open samba file 
sharing but gets nothing back.  It then gives an error message that it 
hasn't received a share list from the other computer.  On both computers 
I am sharing the documents directory.  Does one computer have to be 
running server software or are equal peers acceptable?

3.  On the sharing program (shares-admin) I can't get any other opition 
other than Unix network nfs when I investigate the properties of the 
documents folder.  Maybe this is the problem?  By the way, the 
shares-admin program is really a poor program.  Is there a better one 
out there.  Either that or what file needs to be manually edited?

4. I now wonder if the ping problem is really the cause of the network 
problems.  Maybe they are two separate but related problems.

I know that this might be too much information but in my experience 
sometimes a minor detail gets us on the right track.  Thanks for the 
help even if the problem isn't yet solved.