[ILUG] Simple samba sharing, XP, WiNS and NetBIOS

[Paul Jakma]

Hi,

I'm trying to setup a simple, public samba share. That part seemed 
easy, just a few lines in smb.conf - nautilus could browse the share, 
smbclient was happy, etc.

The difficult part seems to be to get those notoriously 
hard-to-use[1] OSes to be able to browse the share, in particularl MS 
Windows XP. The users of such machines can see the "workgroup" in 
their "Network Neighbourhood", but if they try open the workgroup, 
the get an error similar to the one given at:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Linux/Linux_Setup/Q_21977436.html

With some further research the problem appears to be that these 
unfriendly OSes do not support NetBIOS/IP name resolution. I 
confirmed this was the case by having a user manually specify my 
Samba server as the WiNS server - bingo, it all worked.

So my question is:

- Is there an /easy/ way to get MS Windows XP to use the NetBIOS/IP
   service offered by Samba's 'nmbd' daemon for name resolution for
   browsing network shares? Or WiNS, or some other easy to allow
   Samba sharing to work easily with XP clients on ad-hoc networks?

Thanks.

1. You know the ones, they require endless fiddling with options, 
rarely behave consistently from release to release, etc.[2]

2. Ok, that's true for all OSes nearly..

regards,
-- 
Paul Jakma	paul at clubi.ie	paul at jakma.org	Key ID: 64A2FF6A
Fortune:
A 'full' life in my experience is usually full only of other people's demands.