Path Traveled Start Server does not hang during boot All other Windows clients display this symptom, or there are no other Windows Clients, or it's too difficult to test the other Windows clients The Linux server can ping its own address from its console's command line The Windows machine can ping the IP address of the Linux server

This indicates that the most basic networking connectivity between the two machines is just fine. The hardware's OK and can be ruled out. The Windows machine's IP address (or Wins via dhcp) is working and consistent with that of the Linux machine. They're both on the same subnet.

The problem is with a higher functionality, such as a naming service, or http (web server software, Apache), or samba (smb, nmb, file server software, etc), or sendmail (email server), etc. At this point we can't tell which of these it is, or whether the misconfiguration is on the Linux box or the Windows machine, but at least we've ruled out all basic tcp/ip networking.

The next step is to ping (from the Linux box command line) whatever we were trying to hit when the problem occurred. For instance, if there was a failure pulling up http://www.mysite.com (assumed to be hosted on the Linux server), from the Windows client's browser, ping www.mysite.com on the Linux server's command line. If you tried to telnet to shell.yoursite.com (assumed to be hosted on the Linux server), from the Windows telnet client, ping shell.yoursite.com on the Linux server's command line.

Can you ping the offending name or IP from the command line of the Linux server?

• Yes
• No
• The offending name is the Linux server's IP address (counted as Yes because you earlier established you could ping it from the server's command line). An example of this would be a samba (file server) failure or a failure to pull up the server's main web page by entering http:// and then its IP address.