[ale] Using VMWare/Samba on a DHCP laptop

[Holbrook, Paul]

I've got a laptop that I'm dual-booting RH 6.1 and Win98 on.  I've installed Win98 under VMWare, and I'm trying to get Samba set up to allow VMWare to see the other Windows partitions on my laptop.  I've got VMWare set up in bridged network mode.

Here's my problem: I take the laptop back and forth between home and work, so I use DHCP rather than a fixed IP address when I boot Redhat.  Normally to get access to my laptop's Windows partitions from Win98 under VMWare, I would set up Samba on my laptop under Redhat.  But to bring up those shares under VMWare/Win98, I have to give a network name of something with a fixed address - something like //myhostip/myshare.  But since my laptop doesn't have a permanent IP adress, I don't have such a fixed address that I can use in VMWare/Win98.

Worse yet, when I boot Redhat off the network, DHCP isn't available, so I don't get any IP address, and the extra bridged network interfaces Redhat normally brings up for VMWare aren't even available (interfaces vmnet0 and vmnet1).

So, my question: what can I do under under Redhat so that:

a) Win98 under VMWare will have a fixed address to get my local shares from
  and 
b) So that when I boot up Redhat offline I can still do my local samba shares from Win98 under VMWare.

-- Paul Holbrook
paul.holbrook at turner.com