can Samba have multiple personalities?

[Robert Dahlem]

Joerg,

On Wed, 29 Apr 1998 23:27:54 +1000, Joerg Lenneis wrote:

>> >Is there any way to give Samba (or more accurately the machine on which
>> >Samba is running) a "multiple personality"? I.e. it might advertise 
>> >itself under different netbios names and offer different services (and
>> >in particular might do encrypted passwords under one name, and not with
>> >the other). 
>> 
>> You did not scan smb.conf(5) for "alias", did you?
>> 
>> Regards,
>>         Robert
>
>There are at least two more ways you can go about this. The first is
>to have more than one configuration file and load them with the help of
>% substitutions. E.g.
>
>[global]
>config file = /usr/local/samba/lib/smb.conf.%R
>
>%R is the protocol name (you could use any other macro useful for
>you). As soon as the value for %R is determined (say "NT1" for
>instance) the configuration file /usr/local/samba/lib/smb.conf.NT1 is
>loaded and merged.
>
>The drawback of this approach is that the semantics of what is
>loaded/merged when can get somewhat tricky to follow.

I guess there are more drawbacks: nmbd also has to read smb.conf and substitute all those tricky includes.

nmbd does not need to have a connection to someone/something specific: it can just happily sit there, broadcast its 
stuff and never have a dialog with anyone. In this case it would really be in trouble resolving something like %R. 
So you can bet that if you hide your netbios name or alias behind "smb.conf.%R" this will never be read, never be 
broadcasted and never be browseable by anyone.

>The second approach is to use network aliases. This means that a
>single network card can be seen under more than one IP address/domain
>name. You can configure a different Samba setup for each of these
>aliases. You need an operating system that supports this, of course.

And you need a samba supporing this. As far as I remember it is sitting on *.137 (not bound to any specific network 
address). 

Regards,
        Robert

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