Chapter 19. A Beautiful Day in the Network Neighborhood

Keep off the grass!

Suburban yard sign

The houses are painted in cheerful colors, there are flowers in the window boxes, people greet you as you walk down the street, and the dogs never bark after sunset. It seems a lovely place in which to open a small teashop and perhaps, someday, retire. Before you decide to move in, though, there are a few things you probably need to know about the Network Neighborhood.

Behind the picture-postcard facade there lies a complex political and social structure, collectively known as the Browse Service . Many people consider the Browse Service to be mysterious and secretive, perhaps because most of its business is handled discreetly, out of the view of the casual tourists. The Browse Service lurks in the background, gathering, maintaining, and distributing the Browse List the list of available servers and workgroups.

You can sneak a peek at the Browse List by clicking the Network Neighborhood icon on a Microsoft Windows desktop. If all is working as it should, you will be presented with a neatly organized graphical view of the available SMB filesharing environment. It will look something like the image in Figure 19.1. By selecting icons you can traverse the SMB hierarchy and view workgroups, servers, print queues, shares, directories, and files. In CIFS terms, this is called "browsing" the network. ^[1]

^[1] IBM and Microsoft should not be blamed for any confusion between Network Neighborhood browsing and Web browsing. They started using the term "browse" well before the advent of the web.

Figure 19.1. The Network Neighborhood

A user 's-eye-view of an SMB filesharing network.