I'm a little frustrated at the moment & I need to vent some, so WHY IS LINUX NETWORKING SO !#@$&*(* COMPLICATED???

At home, I have a desktop and a laptop computer. They are both connected to a Netgear RP-614 (wired) router. Everything works fine...until I try to make them talk to each other.

(Both are running Ubuntu 7.04, BTW, and I multi-boot my desktop to Windows XP Professional, for work purposes...)

From my desktop (in Ubuntu), I can SSH into my laptop. From my laptop, I get an error regarding port 22 if I try to go the other way. I've compared ~/.ssh, /etc/ssh and everything looks like it should work. I've also looked at /etc/hosts on both and can find no reason why it shouldn't work.

OK, fine - I'll use Samba. However, that doesn't work, either. After installing Samba on both computers (server & client), I still can't make them communicate. However, when I boot the desktop in to Windows and share a folder, I can connect from the laptop with no problem.

What am I missing?