WIN XP Home work around?

[18pars]

I was trying to setup FC4 as a file server for my office computers running WIN XP Home. I was able to get one XP box connected ok, but the others were not able to connect to the linux box using Samba.

After hours of frustation, I found documentation in Samba that indicated WIN XP Home would not work in this networking environment. In its place, XP Pro was needed.

I'm not interested in upgrading 10 computers to XP Pro at a cost of approx $200 each in order to connect to linux. It's not very cost effective in a small office environment.

Does anyone know of a workaround to this? Is there a networking client out there that could solve the problem?

Would appreciate feedback, good or bad.

Great forum!

[jombeewoof]

you could use an old trick that almost put novell out

connect 1 XP pro to the shares (drives have to be mapped)
share them from that box to the XP Home boxes

xp home thinks the shares are located on the XP pro and so has no problems connecting

not tested but it should work

[18pars]

Thanks for the info.

This may be a bit too much to tie up a single computer to act as a host for the others, but I'll certainly look into this.

[woppa30]

I use XP home to connect to a SAMBA share, the problem lies in XP homes inability to work in a secure network environment, i.e. using samba as a domain controller. If you are happy and trust your users you can set Security=Share in your smb.conf file, that way they don't need usernames and a apssword to access the shares.
Hope this helps, I spent hours with google, which is normally my friend, but failed to find a better answer for this.
David.