Re: ANNOUNCE: gnomba 0.1

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

Another way of locating machines would be to talk to the WINS naming
server.  Most networks that have many windows boxes talking netbios over 
TCP (the system administrator usually puts one in when the amount 
broadcast packets gets too high).  It maps SMB names to IP addresses. I
don't know if you can ask it to give you its complete database (if it
could do that, you might set up a robust backup wins server running on a
non NT box :).

I haven't looked at the speed differences, but it may be quicker to do a
number of wins queries might be faster than pinging all machines in an IP
range.

James.

--
Email: james@daa.com.au
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/


On Sun, 25 Jul 1999 gandalf@pobox.com wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
> 
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