On Wed, Jul 31, 2002 at 01:12:34AM -0400, Ronald KA4INM Youvan wrote:
> >>How, or what program, needs to be used to enable one to browse a Windows
> >>network from a Linux desktop?
> >That would be Samba (http://us1.samba.org/samba/samba.html). It enables
> you to
> >view Windows shares and from windows view Linux shares.
>
>
> I am obviously confused, I thought samba was a LINUX server for a
> winblows network.
It's a server if you configure it that way. But more importantly, it
allows your computer to speak and understand MS networking protocols.
>
> Why isn't a network client of the M$ kind (NFS sort of) all that is
> necessary?
Not sure I understand your question. Samba is that client, or that
server, as you like.
Look at it this way. Although Windows _says_ it has servers and such,
its networking has really always been pretty much peer-to-peer. Windows
machines on the same network have "elections" to figure out who's going
to be "authoritative" for a while. And on a network, it doesn't really
matter what kind of partition or machine you're dealing with. What's
important is that machine X has a way to ask machine Y for some data,
and machine Y is able to communicate that back in an understandable way
to machine X. They have to use the same "protocol". NFS is that protocol
on Linux, Samba is that protocol for Windows. (Actually, the protocol is
CIFS or somesuch; Samba just manages to speak that language.)
Paul
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 14:58:27 EDT