"netbios name" parameter

[Rowland Penny]

On Thu, 15 May 2025 14:07:01 +0100
miguel medalha via samba-technical <samba-technical at lists.samba.org>
wrote:

> 
> With the obsolescence of NetBIOS,

It isn't actually obsolete yet, NetBIOS is deprecated, there is
a difference and as much as Samba (and Microsoft) say not to use it,
there are people out there who are still using it.

> maybe it's time, for the sake of
> clarity and precision, to introduce a synonym like "short host name"
> to the "netbios name" parameter, which would eventually be phased out
> in the future.

Problem is, it would then have to be 'short hostname in uppercase'

> 
> As it is now, the "netbios name" parameter is the only way to refer
> to the short form of the host name, which doesn't seem to be very
> accurate nowadays...

I would hope that people would know what is meant by 'netbios name' and
you do not really need to actually set it in smb.conf, Samba will do it
for you.

> 
> Lots of other Samba parameters have synonyms, so why not this one?

In my opinion, mainly because there should be no reason for any
synonyms, they can lead to confusion, for instance, how many smb.conf
files have you seen with these two lines in a share:

read only = no
writeable = yes

They both mean the same and worse 'writeable' has its own synonym
'writable'

Rowland