Sometimes you get the tiger...but sometimes he get you and this latest home network “project” of mine has gnawed on me pretty badly. Perhaps you can offer some technical help. It will be heartily appreciated.

I have a small home network initially comprising two computers running Windows XP(Home Edition). This is a peer-to-peer network. There is a full tower PC which I have set up with an Epson 670 printer. That PC is cabled(Fast EtherNet) to a Linksys WCG-200 cable modem/switch-router/wireless access point. The printer is shared using Microsoft's “Printer and File Sharing” moiety. The only protocol running on my home network is TCP/IP, but NetBIOS via TCP has been enabled.

I have a laptop which sometimes participates in the network through its wireless(802.11g) card, but I won't mention it further, because I doubt that it is relevant to this particular problem. It can use the shared printer just fine.

As an experiment, I recently tried Mandriva Linux LE 2005 on an older full tower PC with a wireless-PCI card in it. I have loaded the Samba Client, smbclient, on this machine. This has worked out pretty well except for a maddeningly persistent problem-I can't print from the Linux machine to the printer attached to the full-tower machine running Windows XP. In particular, pinterdrake, Mandriva's printer setup program, can't “see” the shared printer.

I have two HDDs in the experimental PC and when I “disengage” the Linux disk and “engage” the Windows XP disk in it, it prints to the shared printer and “sees” the shared files on the other full tower PC just fine.

When I reverse and engage the HDD with Mandriva Linux on it, I again can see and use the Windows shares on the other machine, but I again cannot “see” the shared printer.

There is a firewall on the switch-router which controls access to the Internet, but none of the other machines, Windows or Linux, are running a firewall at this time, so I don't see how a blocked port or ports could be causing this problem.

Here are some of the things that I have tried, but none of them have affected the printing problem.

I tried swapping the wireless card for a “wired” Fast EtherNet card. The results were the same. (I could browse the shares on the Windows machine, but I couldn't “see” the shared printer.)

I tried the latest version of Mandriva Linux 2006, but the results were the same.

I rebooted both of the computers repeatedly, but this did not help.

I set a parameter in the smb.conf file to be sure that the Windows XP machine was “elected” the browse master, but this did not help.

I installed the “Print Services for Unix” moiety on the Windows XP machine and then tried to connect to the printer there as if it were an LPD server, but this did not work either. Except for this one test, I have been running CUPS and a CUPS-compatible printer driver on the Linux machine.

I ran the Linux installation both with and without the LISA daemon, but neither configuration affected the problem.

Of course, I did some obvious things, like setting the “workgroup=” parameter in smb.conf to the name of my home network, but I already knew about that beforehand.

An odd point, when I have loaded SMB4K, an graphic Internet file transfer utility on the Linux machine, I can “see” the shared printer along with the shared file directories on the Windows machine.

I have tried to manually set up the shared printer in expert mode, using both the server and network names with the share name of the printer, but this didn't help.

As a person with only moderate experience with Linux, maybe I'm missing something obvious here. Does anyone have any suggestions?