libsmbclient: Browsing and a URI spec?

[Steve Langasek]

On Thu, 4 Jan 2001, Welsh, Armand wrote:

> Yes, but it doesn't need to be in the smb.conf, because nothing that uses
> smb.conf to this date supports browsing in the way we are discussing, or
> authentication in the manor being discussed.  True, this could be done in
> smb.conf, but I say it should be in it's own file.  Why?  because smb.conf
> is the config file for the samba suite.  It deals with configuring the
> server, and only marginally does it have anything to do with the client.
> The only place that it does deal with the client is that the client pulls
> server settings, to use as default client settings. 

> So looking at it again, can you agree that up to now, the smb.conf file is a
> server config file?  

In fact, there is at least one parameter in smb.conf which is used almost
entirely as a client configuration option: 'name resolve order'.  As a server,
samba rarely has occasion to resolve netbios names to IPs (this will happen in
security = server or security = domain when locating the authentication
server, but that's about it).  OTOH, smbclient needs this whenever you run it,
unless you explicitly provide the -I <IP> option.  There are other global
settings in smb.conf which are equally useful to both smbclient and to
smbd/nmbd, so I can't agree that smb.conf is exclusively a server config file.

Moreover, many of these config options that are used by both client and server
are going to be set to the same values for both Samba and libsmbclient-using
apps.  Why require an admin to specify the 'name resolve order' or the 'wins
server' two different ways in two different config files?

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer