HOW-TO fix “Timeout on Server” in openSUSE 11

Continuing my involvement with openSUSE 11, I am happy to report than now even my office network is connected and browsable (yesterday I had printing success). So things are going well. For now.

1. The problem was that I had attempted to connect to my office network like the openSUSE 10.2 days, and instead found that SAMBA (smb://) was giving me problems and not allowing me to even see my network.

2. I thought it was a KDE4 problem so I installed KDE3.5, and stopped the firewall, and instantly I was able to browse my network through SMB.

3. All good, I thought, until I got the dreaded “Timeout on Server” message when I tried to reaccess the server. I do remember seeing this message in the past, openSUSE 10.2, but was able to fix it by removing the firewall or by restarting openSUSE or even by waiting for a long time. No such luck this time, I had the server timeout message going on for a few days.

4. Internet help, didn’t seem to directly deal with my problem. Neither did the Forums (yes I was desperate). But I did come across a very extensive HOW-TO fix SAMBA from a famous “Swerdna” in the site: http://www.swerdna.net.au/linhowtolanprimer.html#nicwin

5. The HOW-TO was very difficult to follow through verbatum, especially because I am not a systems administrator. But still I trudged along and installed everything I should, and made a few minimal changes.One of the significant changes I made was that in the samba configuration file I replaced workgroup = WORKGROUP to workgroup = NAMEOFMYWORKGROUP (ie. the actual name of my workgroup)

6. I still did not have any luck and kept getting the timeout message.

7. In the Swerdna HOW-TO,however, there were two commands, “rcnmb restart” and “rcsmb restart” (without quotes) as “su” users.This restarts SAMBA.

8. I suddenly had a brainwave and instead of typing my loggin-password details (for my office network as) NAMEOFMYWORKGROUP/myname and PASSWORD I now typed myname and PASSWORD.

9. It worked. the SAMBA configuration had already put my Workgroup name in the settings, so my password was simpler and I guess the restarting of the SAMBA helped as well.

10. So far, my network has worked even though I have restarted my computer, which is a good sign. Now I have to see whether it will work with the SAMBA configured Firewall back on.

11. (latest update: I got the Firewall started and like Swerdna advised did the settings as I should. I realised that I couldn’t browse my network from SMB, it said that my firewall prevented me to, but I could directly access it using my IP address (which I got from my network administrator. So things are still good!).

On to more openSUSE adventures…