My Browsing experience

[Benjamin Kuit]

BROWSING.txt tries to help people solve their browsing problems, just
want to add something of my experience that might be useful in it.

In my test domain, my W2K machine would only show itself in 
"My Network Places", not showing the samba PDC, even though I was
using a WINS server.

Also curiously, when using smbclient -L <server> -U <user>, I would
get a server/workgroup listing for certain users, and wouldn't show
the server/workgroup list for "smbclient -L <server> -U %" (this
should've been my hint, oh well).

BROWSING.txt mentions that you need a valid guest account ( default
"nobody" ) for browing to work.

This is not enough, this guest account must also have permissions to
view "browse.dat" file located in the lock directory, as well as
access permissions to all parent directories.

My problem was that during the installation of samba, /opt/Samba/var
was created with user-only access (due to my umask), so the guest
account (and other non-root and non-me users) could not read browse.dat
thus browsing wouldn't work.

Hope this'll help someplace.

Bj

-- 
+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+
|      Benjamin (Bj) Kuit       |  Building 4, 447                     |
|      Systems Programmer       |  Faculty of Information Technology   |
|      Phone: 02 9514 1841      |  University of Technology, Sydney    |
|      Mobile: 0416 184 972     |  Email: bj at it.uts.edu.au             |
+-------------------------------+--------------------------------------+