You must have it set up properly for DHCP then. I wasn't answering your Samba question, I thought you said you couldn't get out to the Internet on your Linux box.
As far as your Samba questions I have it on my list to write a HOWTO on that because the documentation is pretty lax out there on the net as far as getting a n00b going. It would be certainly helpful if you already understood Windows networking but apparently you are not at that level yet. Samba is a fairly complex service that can be difficult to understand, if you don't already understand Windows networking concepts. And at first it can be difficult even if you *do* have an understanding of windows network concepts.
Right now you probably are only doing basic WORKGROUP file sharing on your M$ machines. You can do this with Samba as well but I prefer to have a Linux machine that will be up all the time acting as a Primary Domain controller and set your Windows machines up to be participate in the NT domain. I realize that you probably have no idea what this is either and until I write my HOWTO it's *way* too in depth to try to expain here now.
I do have to say that once you understand the concepts Samba really is very easy, and I might even go so far as to say it's *easier* than Windows networking on Windows. In the mean time you might want to look over pages like this:
http://hr.uoregon.edu/davidrl/samba.htmlSkip the parts about obtaining and installing Samba as you already have that part done.
There are no simple tools (for n00bs) that I am aware of to configure Samba other than the "swat" web interface that is included with Samba. But again, if you don't understand the concepts you might be lost in that graphical configuration utility as well. If you are on Red Hat and have "swat" installed you can turn it on by doing this:
$ su -
(enter root's password)
# chkconfig swat on
# service xinetd reload
Then open your browser on the machine you want to configure and enter "
http://localhost:901" in the URL box. You will need to log in to swat as "root" and use your local root password. You can also set it up to access swat from browsers on other machines but I will not go into that right now.
[ December 20, 2002: Message edited by: void main ]