how I learned to stop worrying and to love samba

[anodos]

Reading though some MS documentation and came across this tidbit:
'the problem with Browser has always been that Microsoft's networking model grew out of a peer-to-peer paradigm rather than a client-server model. Rather than letting a central server maintain a list of available servers Microsoft's Browser depended on servers finding each other and electing one of their numbers to act temporarily as the keeper of the server list. It was a good try, but it never really worked well and over the years the cry, "Why can't I see [my computer, some server, anything at all] in Network Neighborhood" has wasted a person-millenia of support time.'

So the next time you can't find your samba server or various other computers in your network, remember this: this is an accurate implementation of Microsoft's protocol. It is really that bad. :)

 

[fracai]

This is not leading me to love SMB.

 

[mattlach]

I really haven't had that problem since the late 90's

But then again, that's about the time I learned to navigate directly to the share using \\server\share, mounted it to a drive letter, and never used network neighborhood again :p

 

[Knowltey]

Yeah, I get an odd issue every once in a while of my desktop and laptop stopping being able to see each other.