(no subject)

[Steven French]

>From: "l. a. walsh" <lwlsh at tlinx.org>
>Subject: Running smb without nmb? (Linux Suse 8.1 feature)

>I recently upgraded my Linux distro to SuSE 8.1 which
>came w/samba 2.2.5.
>
>A feature of the upgrade was that it 'split' the startup
>script for samba from 1 script for _smb_ & _nmb_ to 2 scripts.
>
>Ok -- enough of my whining.  Question is this: is there any good reason
>for splitting the two or making so one is runnable w/o the other?

That is cool.   I thought that I was the only one who prefers not to run
nmbd  :)

On my test systems I don't want to deal with WINS related traffic, and as a
general practice prefer to limit the network services running on my servers
to the minimum.     Although that means the server will not be sending
browser announcements which might make it harder for other servers to find
mine, if you are configured for DFS (or perhaps with 3.0 servers publish
your servers shares in ActiveDirectory) that may not be a big restriction.
The Linux CIFS VFS is passed IP addresses and does not need/use Netbios
names anyway so the RFC1001 support that nmbd helps with is not necessary.
It is also a lot easier to only have to (re)start one daemon (smbd) when
you are testing different versions of the server.

Steve French
Senior Software Engineer
Linux Technology Center - IBM Austin
phone: 512-838-2294
email: sfrench at us.ibm.com