I'm genuinely unsure if this is the right forum to post this in, but it's relevant to distros in my mind... read on.

Hokay, so... I have small home network of three Win-doze XP Home boxes and one Linux box running as a server (web and files). I'm using Mepis for my Linux distro and for like a SPLIT SECOND, it was working how I wanted it to.

Basically, I wanted to host all my files on the Linux box and have them be accessable via mapped network drives, also all the computers need to see each other and their respective shared folders. Like I said, I had it working for a hot minute, then it just suddenly stopped.

Now I'm trapped with no access to all my files on the Linux box. I think why it died was 'cause my router was totally eff'd (I called it the Highspeed-to-Dial-Up converter, lol). I replaced it yesterday, but still no dice (but my i-net no longer crawls, lol). The only way to access them is put them in the the Apache www folder, and that's only one-way since I don't have the FTP setup, and anyhow, FTP'ing my files would be totally lame..

My cable path is setup like this:
Two Windows boxes and the Linux box are on a hub, then plugged into the router. My house is CAT5'd but the room with the most computers only has one plug. In another room, the other windows box is plugged directly into the router.

So, what I wanted to know is this, is there a better distro that is more Windows network friendly (and better for a file/web server) that I should be using? Is my network path any sort of problem? I don't know a proper way to setup a network. Any help on this would pretty much rock my happybag, thanks! =)

One tip I find easier is to simply FTP files to and from Linux. Your set up sound fine, the distro (well, I'm no expert it should work), the other thing to do when networking Windows to Linux is to use SAMBA, another thing I'm no expert at, but, any consolation, look into SAMBA and you can network path windows and linux just fine.

Gah! I swore I put that in there. I am indeed using SAMBA, though it's hit and miss on whether that will boot up or not as of late... usually I just see it in the tray trying to start. I know there's a problem there, but shouldn't my Windows machines at least see the other shares on one another? The one that's directly hooked up to the router sees the shares, and the one of the boxes hooked up to the hub has no problems seeing the shares, but one doesn't... and they're all setup exactly the same. Which I think is weird with a capitol "WE". Plus, when SAMBA is working, the box on the router and the linux box can talk freely, haven't tested it with the other box that works on the hub.

Can you FTP to the Linux box, maybe it's user settings too.... That could be a problem, plus, If I'm not mistaken, Windows should also be configured to work with Samba as well, so I don't know if it's the Windows settings or Linux on Samba. If you can FTP or Telnet into the Linux box, then your linux setting should be in tacted even for Samba.

In my experience, which is limited, Samba just worked magically. I'm thinking you're right, that it's a problem with the windows settings.

The suck is that it's my main box that isn't playing nice, and I want to use the file/web server to code in a native PHP envoronment, using windows dev tools. As opposed to running Apache, PHP and MySQL running on windows, which has given me lots of unpredictable results... if I was FTP'ing to the server that's in my room, I may as well be FTP'ing to my remote server. I want to just click save, hit refresh in the browser, and see the changes.

try FTP/NFS/SMB if those don't work I use this load on your windows box's a X11 client and login using ssh as a forward to your computer works wonders

i have a wild mix of 4 computers at home and we use rather mixed network where i work (Solaris, Win XP, Linux)
My advise - FTP/HTTP server. Use konqueror/IE/Firefox to access the file system, ssh/rlogin for the command shells. write scripts which uplaod the files to the FTP server or drag&drop the files in the WEB browser