9.2 What Is Browsing?

To most people browsing means they can see the MS Windows and Samba servers in the Network Neighborhood, and when the computer icon for a particular server is clicked, it opens up and shows the shares and printers available on the target server.

What seems so simple is in fact a complex interaction of different technologies. The technologies (or methods ) employed in making all of this work include:

• MS Windows machines register their presence to the network.

• Machines announce themselves to other machines on the network.

• One or more machine on the network collates the local announcements.

• The client machine finds the machine that has the collated list of machines.

• The client machine is able to resolve the machine names to IP addresses.

• The client machine is able to connect to a target machine.

The Samba application that controls browse list management and name resolution is called nmbd . The configuration parameters involved in nmbd's operation are:

Browsing options: os level (*) , lm announce , lm interval , preferred master (*) , local master (*) , domain master (*) , browse list , enhanced browsing .

Name Resolution Method: name resolve order (*) .

WINS options: dns proxy , wins proxy , wins server (*) , wins support (*) , wins hook .

For Samba, the WINS Server and WINS Support are mutually exclusive options. Those marked with an (*) are the only options that commonly may need to be modified. Even if none of these parameters is set, nmbd will still do its job.