Using Samba, Second Edition

Windows Workgroups and Domains

Up to now, we’ve covered basic SMB technology, which is all you would need if you had nothing more advanced than MS-DOS clients on your network. We do assume you want to support Windows clients, especially the more recent versions, so next we’ll describe the enhancements Microsoft has added to SMB networking—namely, Windows for Workgroups and Windows domains.

Windows Workgroups

Windows Workgroups are very similar to the SMB groups already described. You need to know just a few additional things.

Browsing

Browsing is the process of finding the other computers and shared resources in the Windows network. Note that there is no connection with a World Wide Web browser, apart from the general idea of “discovering what’s there.” On the other hand, browsing the Windows network is like the Web in that what’s out there can change without warning.

Before browsing existed, users had to know the name of the computer they wanted to connect to on the network and then manually enter a UNC such as the following into an application or file manager to access resources:

\\toltec\spirit\

Browsing is much more convenient, making it possible to examine the contents of a network by using the point-and-click GUI interface of the Network Neighborhood (or My Network Places^[5]) on a Windows client.

You will encounter two types of browsing in an SMB network:

• Browsing a list of computers and shared resources

• Browsing the shared resource of a specific computer

Let’s look at the first ...