issue with pnethood in Windows-based network

[chiron]

Good evening all,

I recently installes Puppy 4.31 on my office machine, which is part of a network of windows-based machines. Several of the windows boxes have shares, and with the old Puppy 2.16 I had no problem using them.

When I want to use Pnethood, it sometimes doesn't see the machines, sometimes it sees one of them, which has no shares, but it never sees all machines in the network, unless I first start LinNeighborhood and scan the network with it. If I try to mount the shares with LinNeighborhood, it fails, but after I display the whole network structure in LinNeighborhood, Pnethood sees all Windows machines, including all shares, and can use them.

So, what does the LinNeighborhood do so after it found the shares, Pnethood sees them, too? And why does LinNeighborhood crash, when I try to use it to mount the shares it displays?

I also tried my old mountscript from 2.16, but it gives me the 'init-iconv' error that was posted someplace else and does not mount the shares.

mount.cifs does not do the trick either. Only way to access the shares is first Linneighborhood and then pnethood.

EDIT: I didn't want to start a new thread, this was supposed to go to the Pnethood thread. Can be moved deliberately

[mrbulldog]

This is the first time I have seen any reference to this disfunctional, broken software application.
I have used Puppy Linux 3.01 for a very long time, and have been able to get just about everything I want working.
The 4.... series has been hell for me - broken beyond belief.
Someone please fix this stuff.
I love using Puppy Linux 3.01, and recommend it to other people, but the 4.... series - no way.
The 431 release to me is good for one reason only - it supports 3g mobile broadband devices.
I hope someone picks up on this whinge I'm having.
If so, I am willing to provide detailed descriptions of those things I reckon don't work.

[disciple]

I hope someone picks up on this whinge I'm having.
If so, I am willing to provide detailed descriptions of those things I reckon don't work.

If you have a bug, post it in its own thread in the bugs section (unless it has already been posted). Most of the bugs that affect me are supposed to have been fixed lately (although I must confess I'm still running 4.1.1 with the bugs manually fixed), so I'm curious about what your problems are with 4.31.

This is the first time I have seen any reference

You obviously don't keep an eye on the forum. Pnethood was written for Puppy and has been used throughout the 4.x series. It makes it much easier for most people to do what they want than linNeighborhood does. But since it is very basic and networking with Windows is horrendously complicated, people having trouble with it regularly show up here. Unfortunately it is currently unmaintained too
But if it doesn't work with the peculiarities of their network, people can always try Linneighborhood... or write their own program since there is not much else to try

to this disfunctional, broken software application.

Since chiron is also complaining about Linneighborhood crashing, I can only assume it is dysfunctional and broken in your book too.
But anyway, I think most of the problems with both pnethood and linneighborhood are actually not problems with those guis, but with the underlying tools they use. I'm not the only for whom they don't perform as well in 4.31 as in older Puppies (the rest of the network not having changed), so I think something has changed about smbclient and maybe nbtscan and stuff.

chiron - have you tried running pnethood, then putting in a username and rescanning the network? At least some of us need to do this in 4.31, even though nothing on our network should need a username or password.

[Ian]

I had problems with pnethood in puppy 431 not finding any machines on my network where LinNeighbourhood in puppy 2.7 had no problems so I wrote a GUI frontend ( pnethood_connect ) that allows me to enter the address of my server (sme based) and I can then log on and access the server.

It is in this topic : http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=50078

Hope this helps