IP Networking

I've installed Mandrake 8.1 over the weekend as has someone else in my apartment house. We share a LAN between the apartment with three computers. I've managed to configure SAMBA and if the computers are on windows then we can see my comp. I can't see their comps though. Whenever I go to home/Local Network I get Could not connect to host localhost.

I've tried configuring the network file in the etc/network directory with no luck. It even has my computer name and so forth. Why can I not see the other comptuers?

The other guy in my apartment house has installed mandrake also and he can't view my comp either. I can't ping their comps either but I can ping myself (der!) but they can see me on the network in the right workgroup. I have no clue as how to go about this.

Thanks,
Kyph

first, I would recommend that you have your /etc/hosts file set up correctly on both machines to ensure you have the proper ip addresses mapped to the proper machines.

if you guys are on different networks, then you will have to use a "route" statement to set up the route to his/her network as well as identify your machine as the gateway to that network. the man page for the "route" command is excellent.

if you plan to share files between the two mandrake boxes, you don't need Samba. All you need is to ensure the appropriate NFS daemons are running on both machines, and that you have your /etc/fstab files set up properly to share and mount information. get all that working, or at least try, and let me know what happens. send an email if you want because I don't get to check this site as often as I do my email.

hope this helps.