Having networked a Mac and some PCs for a few years now, I have often run into difficulty when connecting from one to the other because of two problems:
1. the default workgroup name is 'workgroup', but my PCs are under 'home'
2. the dynamically allocated ip address of the Mac keeps changing, meaning that the required connection string one day will be different the next day
Finally I have made some headway, when I had a look at a configuration file on the Mac, stored in the Unix file structure. It is called:
/etc/smb.conf
Having experimented with Windows Networking under a few flavours of Linux in the past, I recognised that this was the 'Samba' configuration file, which sets up how the machine is viewed on a windows network. Within this file, I found two very useful options, which when changed, made things a lot easier:
workgroup = Home
netbios name = PowerBook
I also enabled home directory sharing.
[homes]
browseable=yes
Now I can simply refer to my Mac by its name, on my PCs, then enter in my Mac's username and password and I immediately have access to all my files.
This is a lot easier than going into the router configuration to find out my Mac's IP address, then having to type this in to connect.
