Hi Kevin Thanks for the continued useful comments Its probably only my impatience to get things moving that is causing me problems. When you only sitting at the Linux machine in snatched moments between lesons its difficult to build up any sort of momentum However... Things seem to be progressing. I installed Tera Term Pro on the PC and managed to TelNet to the server (including changing back up to su(root). I fiddled round with smb.conf directly and managed to get a share appearing in Networkwork neighbo(u)rhood but it doesn't seem to like my passwords...?!!! I think you are right about the Netscape problem with localhost:901. When the ISDN lead was plugged in it took me onto the web???!!!!! Maybe I'll know more when I run ifconfig tomorrow James Carter p.s yes reply was supposed to go to list so here it is below if it helps any other newbies out there. p.p.s Just received copy of Running Linux BOL was cheapest online (£19 inc p&p)

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I haven't run the suggested commands yet but I know the ISDN card and ethernet card are installed and recognised.

Thats the first stage then. Sounds like you need to try the 'ifconfig' commands next. If you let me know the following information for *both* your machines : IP Address Subnet mask Default router (sometimes called gateway)

This is basically the output of the ifconfig command on Linux. In windows, this is Control Panel->Networking->Protocols->TCP/IP (or something like that).

I gave the eth card an address of 192.168.1.1

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Do I need to add anything to smb.conf before I can link from a PC? You need to configure Samba - either using linuxconf, SWAT or man smb.conf ;-)

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Do I need to set up some sort of nameserver file?

You will need to do name resolving - but lets get the basic IP numbering/networking sorted first.

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I have noticed on boot up that it is flagging a FAIL against Routing services.

Sounds a bit suspicious. Will know more after the output of ifconfig.

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I tried going into SWAT on Netscape at localhost:901 but after thinking

for

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a while I was told that Netscape could not find Keywords.netscape.com (or something similar)

Sounds like netscape was trying to perform a search for SWAT by going to the netscape Internet site ... don't know why.

A good book to have/read is the Network Administrators Guide (either on-line or the hardcopy O'Reilly book) - see http://www.linuxdoc.org/ or http://www.ora.com/

(by the way - did you mean this to come just back to me and not to the list ? If we carry on the conversation on the list, there may be things we talk about that can help other people ...)

Kevin.