Samba wins file

Note that because the request is directed at a single machine, we don't have to worry about any of the problems inherent to broadcasting. The order in which Samba attempts various name-resolution techniques is given with the name resolve order configuration option, which we will discuss shortly. If you have a Samba server on a subnet that still uses broadcasting and the Samba server knows the correct location of a WINS server on another subnet, you can configure the Samba server to forward any name resolution requests with the wins proxy option:.

Use this only in situations where the WINS server resides on another subnet. Otherwise, the broadcast will reach the WINS server regardless of any proxying.

You can set up Samba as a WINS server by setting two global options in the configuration file, as shown below:. Believe it or not, that's all you need to do!

Samba handles the rest of the details behind the scenes, leaving you a relaxed administrator. If Samba is acting as a WINS server, you should probably get familiar with the name resolve order option mentioned earlier. It can take up to four values:. The order in which you specify them in the value is the order in which Samba will attempt name resolution when acting as a WINS server. For example, let's look at the value specified previously:. Next, the hosts value causes it to use Unix name resolution methods.

Finally, if those three do not work, it will use a broadcast to try to locate the correct machine. When someone clicks on a machine in the browse list, the Windows client sends out a broadcast UDP packet seeking the owner of that machine name to respond. As it does the Windows client obtains its IP address and can proceed to open a connection to that address, after which it can request the list of resources that are available on that machine.

So far, so good. This works quite well over a local network. There can be a propagation delay of up to 15 minutes - the time interval between or propagation delay the various types of machine announcements that are sent over the UDP protocol.

It must be mentioned, that UDP broadcast packets are not forwarded by routers. It they did, it would be easy to initiate a UDP broadcast storm with devastating effect on network traffic. The formal parameter syntax is. Upon startup, nmbd will attempt to register the netbios name value with one server in each tagged group.

An example using tags to group WINS servers together is show here. The client features in Samba allow a Linux machine to access Windows shares and shared printers.

The required programs are available in the cifs-utils and smbclient packages. The smbclient Program. The smbclient program queries SMB servers. It accepts a -U user option, for connecting to the server under a specific identity.

Mounting Windows Shares. The mount command allows mounting a Windows share into the Linux filesystem hierarchy with the help of mount. Example Other options can be specified on the command-line; their full list is available in the mount.

Two options in particular can be interesting: uid and gid allow forcing the owner and group of files available on the mount, so as not to restrict access to root. Printing on a Shared Printer.