** Ben Francis ben@franci5.fsnet.co.uk [2003-06-01 00:28]:
Next comes the networking side of things:
IE - fine, can browse the Internet and is pretty fast, can also browse my local Intranet Explorer - cannot see any other machines on the network, when it should be able to see two other Windows 2000 boxes
From the other Windows 2000 boxes the machine shows up in Network Neighbourhood, but when I try to see what is shared I get an error saying the machine is not accessible.
Conclusion - Windows XP does not integrate easily into an existing Windows network!
I installed Windows XP on the same day as you and everything worked first time and it connected to my (XP) network, saw all the shares and connected to Internet Connection Sharing with one simple wizard. I think XP is very good at networking with other XP machines but it's notoriously bad for administration on big networks with NT/2000/2003 running on them.
I think I've cracked that one now, although it's pretty poor that it is not straightforward to integrate into an existing Windows based network. The daft thing is that it integrated fine with my Linux boxes because they don't use any of the Windows proprietary stuff - i.e. it's quite happy with the standards based networking!
I spent an hour or so playing first time around (not constant as I was basically trying to transfer files onto my ZIP drive for someone (my father-in-law who was doing some work in the garden so I was in and out). Anyway, after an hour it hadn't discovered any other machines in Network Neighbourhood, and other machines that could see it couldn't connect to it. When I came back to it a few hours later I spotted some configuration that sets a secure challenge and response for connecting to other Windows machines - once this was disabled things burst into life. I'm still not happy with the installation though - particularly the drive lettering! I also don't have any icons on the desktop apart from a trash can - it doesn't affect my usage, but is a little concerning since I'm sure there should be some!
I found a hard disk installation of Knoppix almost as easy to connect to a Windows network, and considering it ISN'T windows, I think that's pretty darned impressive! There are even graphic interfaces available to make samba even easier I believe!
Not tried a HD install of that, I'm a solid raw Debian user myself, although Gentoo is intriguing me so I may give that a go.
I'm not sure why Windows has to reboot after every little change, although XP seems a little better in this respect.
Windows 2000 was the first step at improving that issue theoretically, but I still had to do two reboots to install a USB modem on my first install of that - which seemed very odd for a supposedly plug and play bus/device on an OS that was aiming to reduce the need for reboots!
As for being off topic, don't think people are too fussy. There have now been about 30 posts on what the correct way to reply to a mailing list is...
Oh dear, that was my fault too!
** end quote [Ben Francis]