ANNOUNCE: gnomba 0.1

[gandalf pobox com]

After what feels like an eternity, we are happy to bring you Gnomba, the
Gnome Samba Browser.

Gnomba is our stab at writing a GUI machine and share browser for the smb
protocol.  Gnomba allows you to scan any number of subnets for machines
with smb.  It has two ways of viewing these machines: either a straight
machine listing, or machines grouped by workgroup.  For each machine you
can then view the list of shares, and mount them.  

You can check out the homepage and download source at the following url,
but we hope to move things soon, so don't get too attached:

Homepage:  http://www.pobox.com/~gandalf/proj/gnomba
Source:    http://www.pobox.com/~gandalf/proj/gnomba/gnomba-0.1.tar.gz
Intel RPM: http://www.pobox.com/~gandalf/proj/gnomba/gnomba-0.1-1.i386.rpm
Screenshot:http://www.pobox.com/~gandalf/proj/gnomba/snap1.jpg

Right now gnomba is a separate tool.  In theory it could/should co-exist
with a file manager, perhaps even be part of it.  We have made no attempt
to do any file browsing, instead we leave that for your favorite file
browser (or command line).

One thing you need to realize right up front when using gnomba is that we
didn't go with the whole "master browser" or netbui broadcast concept,
though we would like to add that in eventually.  I'll explain our
reasoning and the perceived advantages in a bit, but here is how it
affects you:  before you can use gnomba, you must specify a range of IPs
to scan.  This is usually just your subnet, so for instance if your
network address is 10.23.45.0 then you would probably want to scan from
10.23.45.1 - 10.23.45.254.  

We originally wanted to get this out way back in May, however
the whole school to job transition, as well as vacationing, kinda
through that out the window.  There still are a number of things that
should be cleaned up, and some design issues, especially for long
sessions.  However the basic functionality seems to work well, and people
we talked to seemed interested, so we figured it was time to release it.

Any help or suggestions are welcome.  I'd like to add gnomba to the gnome
cvs eventually, so anyone will be able to hack on it.  

Ok now, why IP scanning over "master browser"?  We did this for several
reasons:

-First of all, netbui is non route-able.  This means that if you have a
network with several physical subnets, you can not easily browse all of
the machines using the "master browser" idea.  This also means that our
program will allow you to browse machines across the net.

-Another problem is that when doing smb over IP, you need to know the IP
address of each machine.  When DNS names and nmb names are not the same,
this can be difficult.  All of the other gui smb browsers for Linux we
have seen  operate this way, and were completely useless in our
environment.  
(Why have dns names different from nmb names?  Well at school we could
control the nmb names, but not the dns names.  And who wants to call his
machine crogers1?)

-Lastly, we think it is faster.  A quick ping sweep takes milliseconds,
and we found that gnomba could scan several subnets faster than Windows
could produce the list of names in just one subnet.


Anyways enjoy,

-chris (and brian)

_______________________________________________________
Christopher Rogers      http://www.pobox.com/~gandalf
gandalf@pobox.com       gandalf@darkcorner.net