solved: Could not access windows shares between ubuntu and XP

After spending some time googling for a solution on why I can’t access my samba shares from XP nor my XP shares from ubuntu 8.04 hardy I finally figured it out myself – the firewall as it comes preconfigured was preventing full communication.

The symptom was that I would be able to list shares with

smbclient -L 192.168.0.222

but when wanting to connect to a share, it would give me errors like

tree connect failed: NT_STATUS_BAD_NETWORK_NAME

I also would get messages such as ‘missing \ in share name‘ and the like.

Ubuntus Nautilus was not able to connect to the smb://192.168.0.222/Trip2008 url.

Windows XP would also not see any folders that I had selected as shared in nautilus on the ubuntu side.

The quick solution was to give full access to the windows xp laptop coming from 192.168.0.222  (I will start googling to narrow down what exactly I need rather than allow all access) via:

iptables -I INPUT –source 192.168.0.222 -j ACCEPT

Now I can simply connect with smbclient //192.168.0.222/Trip2008 and XP allows me to see anything exported from ubuntu automatically in the network places view.

Problem solved.