samba - Mar 2002 - unable to connect, unable to restart smb cleanly

I have been having quite a difficult time getting Samba to work on my Red
Hat 7.2 box. 

I have added the necessary things to xinetd so that a port scan shows 139 as
open and belonging to netbios-ssn. If I type smbclient -L //Ilsa (my Linux
box's name) I get a list of shares as I should.

However, running smbclient from my Mac OS X box I get a connection time out.
I can SSH to the machine so I know that the network is good and that the
machine names are all copasetic.

The other oddity is that if I try to restart smb I get FAILED for exiting
smb and nmb and then OK for when they start again. They also show up as OK
on boot up, but failed on a reboot or shut down. I'm not sure if that's
related to the problem, but it sure can't be good.

If this sounds familiar to anyone, please fill me in.

Thanks,
-Rob