Quiet Samba

[Nathan Angelacos]

We have a situation where we do not want our samba servers 
broadcasting their netbios names on the network.  I've never seen 
anyone else discuss this; before I post a possible patch to the samba 
code, I'm interested in knowing if anyone else would find this of 
use.

Our organization has a 3000+node NT network.  To cut down on 
broadcast traffic, the NT boxes are configured to NOT broadcast their
netbios name.  In NT-Speak:

 net config server /hidden:yes

The only machines on our net that broadcast are well-known servers. 
Workstations and other department servers don't broadcast and don't 
show up in browse lists.   Since WINS is used for name resolution, 
these "hidden" nodes are still available if they have the server 
service running (or, say, smbd <grin>):

 net use z: \\myserver\anyshare
 net view \\myserver
 etc.

By default, SAMBA broadcasts its netbios name, and thus all samba 
servers show up on our browse lists.  I've patched the sources to add 
an additional SMB.CONF parameter:

 Hidden server	= yes | no   		# default = no

If set to "yes", this parameter shunts the netbios and OS/2 Lanman 
name broadcasts. It has proven very stable for us since pre 2.0.x 
Samba code.

Before I post this through the proper channels as a possible addition 
to the base code, I was wondering if anyone else out there feels this 
is useful.  In the year I've subscribed to this list, I've never seen 
anyone request this sort of thing - so are we just so unusual that it 
wouldn't be applicable to the samba community in general?

Any comments appreciated.