[KLUG Members] Nautilus smb: - was Two questions.

[Bryan-TheBS-Smith]

Bruce Smith wrote:
> Nautilus/smb: works fine at home, one Win98 box & one Linux box.
> I guess it's takes longer at work because I have more Winxx PC's
> to browse in the workgroup (about 100)???

If you're not using WINS, you _should_.  Just out of sheer performance. 
100 systems, all broadcasting?  Bad things man, bad things!  ;-P

> I've been thinking of doing that.  I need to compile a newer
> version of Samba on HPUX.

Don't they have a binary already at Samba.org?

> I was thinking that I didn't need WINS since I have only one subnet.
> (hence the class "B")   I wasn't thinking of the speed issue.

Yes, _big_time_!  Not just the broadcast, but because each system must
maintain their own "browse list" or, worse, there is "in-fighting" as
every Windows system vies for "browse list master" -- even when you just
power-up a new box.

And even regarding broadcast, it's not so much for your Samba systems,
but for your Windows.  If the Windows systems aren't using WINS, they
use broadcast by default -- where they constantly say "me too!  me too!"
all over your network.  If you set them up for WINS, they use a mode
called "hybrid" where they query the WINS server first, and only _then_
broadcast if they don't get resolution.  You'll see what I'm talking
about when you enable it and run "winipcfg" -- compare it to the
settings in winipcfg before you do.

[ <RANT> SIDE NOTE:  People new to Linux complain that "Samba is
complicated."  Well the f---ing SMB protocol itself is why Samba has
200+ options.  Go blame Microsoft.  Even _they_ have issue with some
different versions of Windows "fighting" with each other on the SMB
protocol -- especially earlier versions that aren't part of an NT
domain.  Microsoft tries to "simplify things" by making only two models,
"workgroup" or "domain."  In actuality, you can screw things up with
either -- and NT/2000/XP doesn't let you 'tweak' it as nicely as Samba,
as long as you know how to wield Samba.  ;-PPP </RANT> ]

> Oh?  What command is that?

"smbpasswd" handles a _lot_ of this.  There are endless docs in the
Samba doc directory that aren't in the smb.conf man page, nor the pages
linked to in SWAT.  I _highly_recommend_ you read them in your spare
time.  Especially the "BROWSING" to start.  That told me about 80% of
what I needed to know to fix 99.9% of Windows Networking problems, even
ones that don't have anything to do with the network (like even just
syncing a CE device ;-).

> Yes, all my HPUX boxes are running NIS.

Good.  So I take it all UNIX systems are NIS clients?  Using NIS, you
don't need a PDC/BDC if your SMB servers are UNIX.  And smbpasswd has
some replication functionality to pass around the ["password
equivalent"/"Microsoft SMB security is a joke"] "encrypted" files
between the systems.

-- TheBS

-- 
Bryan "TheBS" Smith    mailto:b.j.smith@ieee.org   chat:thebs413
Engineer  AbsoluteValue Systems, Inc.  http://www.linux-wlan.org
President    SmithConcepts, Inc.    http://www.SmithConcepts.com
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