A very Peculiar Network Situation - minus the pelican

mr pc · 04 Oct 2010

Currently sitting on desk I have 3 machines, 3 Operating Systems.

Win7 Home Pro on an Asus CM5570 - ethernet
OS X Leopard on a G4 Powerbook - wifi
Lucid Lynx Ubuntu on a Compaq Presario - ethernet

and a Belkin Surf wireless router

Nothing fancy - all OEM network adapters, all machines can connect to the internet just fine - My Windows machine is on a Homegroup with my gf's laptop as well.

Now here is the weird part - Zfter a few hours of finagling my network connections I can:

Share my Win7 to my Mac but unable to share my Mac to PC
I can Share my Mac with my Ubuntu machine, but cannot share Ubuntu to Mac
I can see my Ubuntu machine in my Win7 Network connections but cannot access it.

So it goes like this: Win -> Mac -> Ubuntu ~> Win

So each machine can get a piece of each other - but most concerning is my lack of being able to access either Ubuntu/Mac from My Win machine.

What am I missing with my Windows network sharing (no gpedit for this version of windows) - I don't think this is router related because I have pieces shared between the machines.

I'm so close to getting it all tied together!

chev65 · 04 Oct 2010

There is a procedure to allow Windows 7 Homegroups to set up shares with both Mac and Ubuntu.

You should download this Msoft white paper that explains the process in great detail complete with screen shots.

Just download the .xps document in the link below.

Download details: Windows 7 & HomeGroup: Sharing with Windows XP, Windows Vista, and other operating systems

mr pc · 04 Oct 2010

cool I'll check it out - my biggest curiousity is Windows failure to see the other machines. The Mac is a champ with connecting to the Win machine (my gf's laptop as well)

oddly as well how the Ubuntu machine sees the Mac, but not vice versa, both running Samba I believe.

thanks for the info

mr pc · 04 Oct 2010

The Windows7 setup section doesn't give any insight - just pc name and ip address (they could've suggested ipconfig...haha)

still no dice.

chev65 · 04 Oct 2010

Have you tried relaxing the NTLM levels yet? There are a few more things you can try.

Control Panel - Administrative Tools - Local

Local Policies - Security Options

Network security: LAN Manager authentication level
Send LM & NTLM responses

Minimum session security for NTLM SSP
Disable Require 128-bit encryption

It could also be your A/V software causing a problem.

With Windows 7 Home Premium you would need to edit the registry to achieve the same results.

You should also set up a workgroup on the Windows 7 machine rather than a Homegroup which is mostly made to work with Windows 7 machines.

So you might want to leave the Homegroup first then create a workgroup using the same workgroup name and password for all machines. Also make sure that the date/time is in sync on all machines.

Then edit the registry on the Windows 7 Home Premium machine.

1 . Open registry editor ( Start search - regedit)
2 . Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
3. Create a new DWORD value with the following properties: NAME: LmCompatibilityLevel
VALUE: 1
4. Restart your PC and try the connection again...

mr pc · 04 Oct 2010

I'm sorry - unfortunately I was wrong with my Win7 version - I have Home Premium, which doesn't have the secpol.msc option. Hell, I don't think it has any .msc files ?!?

I can ping my Win7 ip 100% from my Ubuntu machine so it knows it's there. I really thought it would be as simple as the Mac settings with connecting to the server/password/mounting the drive.

hate to say it but my Win7 machine is the biggest pain

mr pc · 06 Oct 2010

So obviously the best answer is always the easiest one - So I was in my network connections window right clicked - group by - more... and added IP address and Mac address to my options that were checked.

Lo and behold - my Mac share and Ubuntu share popped up. I immediately tested the sharing capabilities and my mac worked fine - oddly I can see my Ubuntu machine, but the windows machine cannot access it. I have NFS along with Samba running on my Ubuntu machine, so I guess back to the drawing board.

Now my network works like this

Mac <-> Win7 (besides rights to write to windows share on mac)
Mac -> Ubuntu
Ubuntu ~> Win7 (posts it but can't access- guessing it's at the Ubuntu end)

moving along!