Re: Bridged wireless AP and samba

[Rich Puhek <rpuhek@etnsystems.com>]

James Goldwater wrote:
> I have a debian box acting as an AP, with a bog-standard bridge between 
> the wlan0 and eth0.  I can browse the internet and see machines in my 
> internal network just fine, but am now unable to connect to samba shares 
> from my windows xp box.   I can try \\mysambabox or \\192.168.0.64 and 
> both report the network location cannot be reached.  If I connect the 
> windows xp box through the wired interface instead of wireless, all is 
> fine.   Through wireless I am able to ping the samba box, ssh to it, 
> connect my imap client to the imap server on it fiine etc, it's just 
> samba not working.
> I've run nmap on a udp scan of the samba box from the AP and it just 
> seems to hang; running the nmap scan  from the samba box on itself comes 
> up with netbios ports pretty quickly.  So is there some complexity with 
> briding and UDP, or the hostap driver and UDP?
> Does anyone have any pointers as to where the problem may lie?   I've 
> installed Debian testing with a custom 2.4.20 kernel and the hostap 
> driver; I have a realtek8139 wired card and a Netgear MA311 wireless 
> card.  I have no iptables, no wep etc.
> Thanks for any light you can shed,
>
> James.
>
> PS I don't know if this is related, but in a previous config I had two 
> subnets (one wireless, one wired) with straightforward nat'ing between 
> them - no other iptables lines.  I had identical symptoms.

Run a WINS server. IIRC, the problem is that the so called "browse 
master" ends up on the other end of the bridge, so you can only see 
what's on your side. You can either configure the samba box as a WINS 
server, or just use the XP box (probably does WINS by default).

Dig through the samba docs and the comments in the config file for more 
info.

I had a similar problem develop here. All I had to do to fix it was have 
my DHCP server return a WINS server attribute (and wait around 15 min 
for windows to figure out what the hell was going on).

As for nmap not seeing the ports, check that you're allowing connections 
from the AP's IP address (in smb.conf, hosts_allow = something?).

--Rich


_________________________________________________________

Rich Puhek
ETN Systems Inc.
2125 1st Ave East
Hibbing MN 55746

tel:   218.262.1130
email: rpuhek@etnsystems.com
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