Leopard Cross Networking Issues

Hey guys,

I wish to discuss and seek help at the same time, regarding an issue that I've been facing ever since I got my MBP SR three months ago and it concerns the cross networking/file sharing issues in Leopard. It seems that my MBP just can't seem to discover my two Windows machines(one with Vista and the other with XP). On the other hand, my Windows machines can easily discover my MBP without any kinda issues. I have officially tagged the problem to be associated with Leopard ONLY as I run Vista on Boot Camp and it discovers all my machines seamlessly.

After doing some research, it seems that the problem is fairly common among Leopard users. There is also a website dedicated to the subject --- http://www.macwindows.com/leopard.html.

I was kinda hoping that the 10.5.2 release would fix it, but that didn't really happen. I've tried a lot of stuff to make it work such as enabling SMB sharing and some WORKGROUP checks, but nothing seems to work. The whole system seems to have a mind of its own, really. Sometimes it just works out of nowhere and the moment you restart the machine, it just looses it all again. I know I can always boot into Vista to do all the stuff but I've paid enough money for Leopard to work just right.

I'll really appreciate any kinda help or support from your end. You can refer to me as A.Kap by the way.

Cheers

 

I remember when my brother got a SR MBP running .11 Tiger. I had a linux box and a windows XP pc on the network. The windows PC was was totally "firewalled in" for obvious reasons so no one could talk to it. We had initial success with getting the MBP to talk to the linux box running ubuntu 7.10 over SAMBA. The linux box had a share on it and also served out a printer. But one day X just decided to "forget" all about the linux box. First the printer disappeared, then the share. We would wrangle about for hours to get it back up with rare success. We did all the tips, tricks, and voodoo magic posted around the internet but nothing would work. X was just temperamental or something. Somedays he would boot up and all would be fine. Other days, nah.
I had a hunch that maybe the fault lied with DHCP on our router. At the time we also had a windows laptop floating around and the IP addresses would frequently get shuffled around in their range of 172.x.x.250 - 172.x.x.254. Pure speculation though.

 

I had this issue.

Briefly.

I knew I would be at a wifi hotspot so turned on my OSX Leopard (10.5.2) firewall. I got home and all my windows shares were gone away. In firewall settings, pick the THIRD option. Before turning on the firewall, make sure you enable SMB shares ON YOUR MAC. This causes the SMB ports to automatically be added to your firewall. I have not had a single windows share disappear on me since doing this. I have not turned off or touched my firewall since.

Please note, I don't really have any windows boxes. They are all linux boxes and NAS drives sharing drives as SMB.