Unwanted browselists

Michael Kohne mhkohne at discordia.org
Tue Sep 29 12:26:47 GMT 1998


>Is there a way to prevent browselists from machines other than those
>of my choosing to show up in the browselists/network neighbourhood?
>
>I don't want win95 clients that offer shares themselves to show up
>in the network neighbourhood.

I do not believe this to be possible - The protocols samba runs under are
kind of designed to make everyone visible to everyone. You can make the
samba server software win local browse master elections with a parameter
change. If you then modified the server software you could arrange a way to
eliminate some machines from the reported browse list. I do not believe
that filtering of the browse list is currently part of the software, but it
wouldn't be that hard to add, with a little work.

You could put the clients you don't want to deal with on another 'subnet',
but then there is a lot of work you'd have to do in order to make sure they
could see everything they should, and it wouldn't prevent them from seeing
one another.

My question to you is: Why? Why would you want shares to not show up in the
browse list? I'm curious because I'm afraid you are trying to make things
not show up as a 'security' measure. If so, you should know that just
because it isn't in the browse list, that doesn't mean you can't get to it.
Anyone can simply type a name into the 'find computer' dialog box and
they'll be able to see the shares that machine has available. If security
is your goal, you should instead force your users to password protect their
shares. 

Of course, you might just want to clean up an overly large browse list, in
which case, some filtering of the browse list might be useful. Of course,
asking your users to remove any unneeded shares might also help in this
case. And if that doesn't work, you could go to the windows 95 machines and
remove the ability to share files and printers. That should stop them.

Good luck!




Michael Kohne
mhkohne at discordia.org
"Evolution is God's version of domino rally"



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