Larry Brown wrote:
> PS I can't stand X Pee. I think Win2K rocks (for an M$ app) and they
> should have left well enough alone in this case.
>
While we're mildly off-topic anyway:
The general home end-user plebian public was too intellectually lazy to make
heads or tails of Win2k when it was released as the "home and office"
replacement to both Win9x and NT. It was supposed to unify the Windows line of
OSes, cutting down drastically on the amount of codemonkey overhead that would
be needed to perpetuate two separate lines of desktop operating systems. Since
Joe and Jane End-User were too willfully ignorant to bother figuring out what to
do with stuff like "logging in", Microsoft had to scramble to come up with a
replacement home operating system product or risk losing new cutomers to old
OSes (seeing people continue to use Win98 wouldn't have been of much use to
their bottom line). As a result, they kludged together the basis of Win98 with
"updated feature set" cruft that basically amounted to a bunch of onion powder
on your ice cream, and it worked about as well as that combination of flavors.
After the WinME debacle, they discovered that they needed to replace their
replacement OS post-haste, and hurried with XP. XP, they decided, would be
their unified OS line as Win2k was meant to be. To ensure that they didn't have
the same problems with XP that they had with 2k, though, they produced
"Professional" and "Home" variants. The way they did this was simple: they put
together their "Professional" version, minus a lot of server-class
functionality, and to make it more "user friendly" for the home user they ripped
the guts out of it and stapled the spiritual equivalent of happy faces all over
it. Grab Photoshop, do a little cut-and-paste, and voila, the package says Home
instead of Professional.
The end result is that Professional has mildly updated feature interface, lots
of eyecandy bloat, and a neutered little brother. 2k is definitely the way to
go, generally speaking, for anyone that wants a serious workstation OS from
Microsoft.
################ Back On Topic ################
You may need a Samba update. If you're using Debian Stable, chances are good
it's not quite up to date to fix what XP has broken with its newer approaches to
networking. I'm not sure about such issues on other distributions. If your
application trusts its networking functionality in the hands of the OS rather
than having built-in utility functionality of its own for TCP/IP connections,
you may be scrod. The sad state of affairs is that XP was specifically written
to make networks dependent upon the way Microsoft wants you to run a network.
The more-automated under the hood workings of XP networking try to rewrite the
rules for any network to which it is connected such that you might run into
problems if other machines don't defer to XP's defaults. I'm sure you've
noticed that configuring XP to run a network often prompts you to create a
network configuration disk if you want to make non-XP machines compliant. Such
a disk is, obviously, designed to work with older MS OSes, and nothing else.
The big question that comes to mind here is, of course, "What application are
you trying to run?" That might actually have an effect on how to solve the
problem. If it worked on a Win2k box with the database housed on Linux, then it
should be possible to make it work on an XP box with the database housed on
Linux as well. The caveat here is that I'll make no promises if it's XP Home
(which lacks some of XP's networking functionality). So: there's another
question. "Is it XP Home or XP Pro?"
You might also want to check on your samba-related configuration files
(particularly access-related configuration, such as samba password files) to
determine whether there is any host-specific restriction on who can access what
shares from which computers.
Oh, yeah, that's another thing: If I recall correctly, XP also handles password
encryption differently from 2k, and I'm afraid that I haven't had to actually
deal with the problem yet where Samba is concerned, so I don't have any guidance
on the matter off the top of my head. It's something you might look into, though.
I'm mostly rambling on in the theoretical here, in part because I don't recall
running into your particular problem (despite being on a multidistro Linux, XP,
2k, and 98 heterogenous network), and in part because I don't know what
distribution of Linux, password encryption for Samba, network traffic management
systems, or database-driven application you're running.
Ah, yes, one more simple question: "Do you have XP's Personal Firewall running?"
If so, turn the damned thing off. It's nothing but trouble.
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