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Using Samba
book

Using Samba

by Robert Eckstein, David Collier-Brown, Peter Kelly
November 1999
Beginner to intermediate content levelBeginner to intermediate
413 pages
16h 7m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Using Samba

Virtual Servers

Virtual servers are a technique for creating the illusion of multiple NetBIOS servers on the network, when in reality there is only one. The technique is simple to implement: a machine simply registers more than one NetBIOS name in association with its IP address. There are tangible benefits to doing this.

The accounting department, for example, might have an accounting server, and clients of it would see just the accounting disks and printers. The marketing department could have their own server, marketing, with their own reports, and so on. However, all the services would be provided by one medium-sized Unix workstation (and one relaxed administrator), instead of having one small server and one administrator per department.

Samba will allow a Unix server to use more than one NetBIOS name with the netbios aliases option. See Table 4.6.

Table 4-6. Virtual Server Configuration Options

Option

Parameters

Function

Default

Scope

netbios aliases

List of NetBIOS names

Additional NetBIOS names to respond to, for use with multiple “virtual” Samba servers.

None

Global

netbios aliases

The netbios aliases option can be used to give the Samba server more than one NetBIOS name. Each NetBIOS name listed as a value will be displayed in the Network Neighborhood of a browsing machine. When a connection is requested to any machine, however, it will connect to the same Samba server.

This might come in handy, for example, if you’re transferring three departments’ data to ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 1565924495Supplemental ContentCatalog PageErrata