Re: [TCLUG:8266] SMB mounting: a Campus view

["Clayton T. Fandre" <cfandre@maddog.mn-linux.org>]

Kevin Bullock wrote:
> 
> Greetings all--
> 
> I realize this is a little later, but the recent Samba thread happened to
> coincide with an interesting little incident I unwittingly caused on the
> St. John's campus network. I like to have my home directory mounted
> (they've got NT servers :/ except in the CompSci department which is
> filled with SGI machines :D ), whether I'm in Windows or Linux. So I had
> Samba set up. When I was screwing around with configuration one day, I set
> the 'workgroup' option in smb.conf to the workgroup name of our network,
> and thereby made my machine want to be a master browser (read: Bad
> Thing(tm) for the NT servers). When the IT folks traced it back to my dorm
> room, they shut off my port and called me to bring in my machine so they
> could "look at it" -- which they did, and we had a chat about Samba and
> interactions with NT. The Unix admin was there too, and he said he'd never
> heard of the drive-mounting capability in Samba (smbmount -- what version
> added that in? I was surprised).
> 
> So after I got the phone call (and before I took my machine in the next
> day), I purged out (yay dpkg) the daemon/server portions of Samba (smbd,
> nmbd) and just left samba-doc, samba-common, smbmount, and smbclient in
> place.
> 
> So my main question is this: Is there anything left that could screw with
> NT's head and cause similar problems, or am I safe to mount my home
> directory again?

As long as you don't make your machine a master browser (or a PDC) then
you should be fine. By just setting your workgroup name to the NT domain
doesn't mean your machine will be a master browser. The 'domain master'
and 'local master' options in smb.conf set whether or not your machine
will be a master browser. Set both of these to no and you should be OK.
And even if the 'local master' setting is yes, your machine shouldn't
win elections unless there is something wrong with the NT domain. The
primary domain controllers should win the elections.

Check the smb.conf man page for more info.

But if you don't need to access your machine from another NT machine,
don't even run samba. Just use the smbmount utility and everything
should be fine.

Clay 

-- 
Clay Fandre
cfandre@maddog.mn-linux.org
Twin Cities Linux Users Group
http://www.mn-linux.org