novice networking probs

I apologise for writing this stuupid question, but i am extremely baffled by my linux system.

Basically i am a linux novice and want to get my linux workstation onto my
windows 2000 server network.

What i've done so far is got to the stage where i can see and access the networked machines in linux using "smb:" in nautilus. I can ping my linux machine using the IP address i assigned it from any of the windows machines, however i don't think it's part of the domain as it isn't recognized by name or on
network neighbourhood.
I assumed i needed the samba daemons installed and
have tried to follow some "learning samba articles, and these seem to go through fine, however after configuring and running the makefile, and changing the smb.conf file to my workgroup i am still in the same situation as when i didn't install the daemons.
Also i still do not have the smbd or the nmbd services running and my red hat linux workstation doesn't seem to have them installed even though there is a folder called smbd on the machine. I know i'm probably doing something stupidly wrong, but i can't figure out what.

Also the locations of certain services like the smbusers and smbpsswd seem to be none existant on my machine. Should they be in the same place as the smb.conf file as there is only one other file at this location.

Is there anything you guys can think of that i might be doing wrong?

Also could you tell me whether or not i will be able to access the internet through my windows server from the linux machine, at present i get a http 407 error and i assume this is something to do with samba.

I pretty much know that i am not logging onto the domain but i can see my network minus the linux system, and i can also print to my networked printers through jetdirect connections.

All help would be greatly appreciated, or even links to anywhere i might be able to find a solution.


Thanks
Muz

to your smb problems: don´t install samba from their homepage! use your redhat-supplied rpm-packages instead. they pre-configured it for you. the samba folk´s cannot since there is some 100 linux distros out there.

unless you are a pro on linux, never install any software not supplied by your distributor.


nope, this is not related to samba. http is http. samba is smb. this is two totally different protocols.

setup your win**** machine to do "internet connection sharing" for your linux machine´s IP, then it should work.

some hint: samba <2.2 does not support domain logins at all, if you want to have any succes using samba with win2k or winXP, setup your samba (2.2) server to be PDC and the windows machine to be client.

or use non-domain based networking. read your samba docs for this.