samba - Mar 2002 - Network Path could not be found on HP with XP

We have one brand new HP EPC-43 which can see all the Windows boxes, but
not the Samba shares on the Unix server. We have many other Windows
machines of all vintages including 95, 98, 98se, NT, 2000, ME and XP which
can see each other and the Samba server. The HP runs XP, but we have other
XP boxes which have no difficulty with Samba.

We have a simple network with no domain controller, just individual
independent boxes. All see each other and the FreeBSD based SAMABA 2.3.3
server without difficulty.

For a long time we were convinced it must have something to do with
plaintext/encrypted passwords, but we have tried it both ways and still
get the message "The network path \\netdisk\sharename could not be
found".
There is a pause of 30 seconds or so before the message appears,
suggesting to me that it is the host and not the share that can't be
found. 

The HP box has no trouble with any other network service that we can find
including other tcp/ip services. We did notice one odd thing about this
machine. As delivered from the factory, Netbui is not installed, and no
other hosts were recognized untill we installed it. The other XP machines
came with Netbui already loaded. That got us to thinking that maybe there
was something special about HPs installation of XP.

This is a hard problem to research on the mailing list, as two letter
search terms don't seem to be accepted at marc.theaimsgroup.com. Is there
another search engine for the samba mailing list that would accept "hp
xp"
as a valid search?

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg at nber.org

Problem was an HP EPC-43 that interacted with Windows shares, but couldn't
mount Samba exported shares, for which it always reported "Network path
could not be found".

Turns out that HP ships the machine with a registry entry setting the
"Node Type" to "Peer to Peer", and this made the Samba share
invisible to
the HP system under the netbios name. It was visible if we used the DNS
name of the Samba server (something we didn't know when I posted the
original query). The cure was to remove the superfluous registry entry.
Here are details in case anyone is interested:
>From mohan at nber.org Thu Mar 14 16:59:39 2002
> This is what we found that fixed the problem.  The new WinXP pc from
> HP was configured to negotiate peer-to-peer which looks for a WINS
> server to resolve a NetBIOS name.  Since there is no WINS server the
> HP was not finding it.  Samba sends its share thru the NetBIOS name.  
> Here is the fix for it:
> 1)To check whether it is peer-to-peer: From command prompt, give
> ipconfig /all command.  Look for value of "Node Type"
> (b)roadcast,(p)eer-to-peer, (m)ixed,(h)ybrid are the choices).  It
> comes up as "unknown" if nothing is set.
>
> 2) Regedit. (on a WinXP, Win2000, WinNT)
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/Netbt/Parameters>
>
> (On a Win95)
> HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/VxD/MSTCP
>
> Look for 2 keys: NodeType or DhcpNodeType.  Both take DWORD numeric
> values.  The values are 1=b-node;2=p-node;4=m-node;8=h-node
>
> Just delete any entries to these 2 keys.  The default according to
> MSoft web site is b-node (broadcast), although in ipconfig /all, Node
> Type comes up as "unknown".
>
> The other effect of this is that it makes NetBUI redundant for
> browsing shares any more, and absence of NetBUI makes the system
> reboot much faster.
>
> -- Mohan