Listing Shares

Now that you've identified a machine, how can you find out what shares it has? This task, and most others associated with Windows networking, can be done with the smbclient program, which is part of the standard Samba distribution. The syntax for listing shares is:

$ smbclient -L HOMER

added interface ip=192.168.0.1 bcast=192.168.0.255 nmask=255.255.255.0

Password:

Anonymous login successful

Domain=[CURTIS] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 2.0.7]

Sharename Type Comment

--------- ---- -------

site-local Disk

c Disk Old Windows 95 Installation

IPC$ IPC IPC Service (homer server (Samba 2.0.7))

lp Printer HP Deskjet 672C

Server Comment

------ -------

HOMER homer server (Samba 2.0.7)

KEARNEY Tom's Computer

SANJAY Annie's Computer

Workgroup Master

--------- ------

CURTIS HOMER

This is actually a lot more information than you might have expected ”but we'll go through it one piece at a time. I just hit Enter at the password prompt for an anonymous login. There are a few messages at first, and then the first table, which shows the shares available on HOMER, their type, and any comment that's set up in the configuration file. The second table lists the machines in the current workgroup along with their descriptions. This answers our question in the previous section, about how to find the machines on the local network. The third table describes the available workgroups and which machines are the master browsers for each. In my case, there's only one workgroup.

Now if I looked at the shares on KEARNEY, I'd get a different result:

$ smbclient -L KEARNEY

added interface ip=192.168.0.1 bcast=192.168.0.255 nmask=255.255.255.0

Password:

Anonymous login successful

Sharename Type Comment

--------- ---- -------

CDROM Disk

PRINTER$ Disk

CANON Printer

ZIPLIB Disk

IPC$ IPC Remote Inter Process Communication

If I want to specify a different workgroup or a username (in the case of Windows NT domains), I could use the -W and -U options to smbclient, respectively.