Help me make backups go!

In this corner: three Debian servers.

In that corner: a shiny new one-terabyte drive, Apple-formatted, accessible at least to the Macs and Windows boxen in the house. On my laptop, I get to it by running Bonjour for Windows.

What I want to do: on the Debian servers, I want to connect to use smbclient (or, alternately, mount -t smbfs) to connect to this drive.

What happens when I try: I get timeout messages and "Operation already in progress".

On previous attempts, weirdly enough, I actually connected to the drive once. Then when I tried to copy a (large!) file over to it off of newmoon, it timed out on me. Subsequent attempts got me "protocol negotiation failed" until I then started seeing "operation already in progress".

Color me confused. Anybody able to enlighten me as to what's happening here, and what I can do to fix it to make it go? Thanks in advance for any help!

ETA 8:18pm: Turns out all we had to do was kick the Airport hub in the head. When it came back up, suddenly OH LOOK now it works. Yay!