[plug] Linux Network Neighborhood ??

[Leon Brooks]

On Sun, 29 Sep 2002 03:04, Steege, Phil E wrote:
> Is there a Linux GUI equivalent to Network Neighborhood that comes with
> Windows machines ?

For Windows (or at least SMB shares) Gnomba works well. KDE has an equivalent 
but I don't remember the name OTToMH. If you have a mixed LAN (Linux and 
Windows) SMB is probably the easiest sharing protocol to use, if hardly the 
most secure.

There are so many ways of sharing files under Linux that an integrated tool to 
do the lot would be a gargantuan achievement. You can find Linux machines 
quickly enough with this:

    /bin/ping -b -c 2 $(/sbin/ifconfig eth0 | \
      /bin/gawk '-F[ :]+' '/Bcast:/ { print $6 }')

Windows machines don't respond to broadcast pings, so do `nmblookup '*'' to 
find them, and `nmblookup -A 192.168.333.444' (192.168.333.444 being an 
address returned by the previous lookup) to see what they think they're 
called and own.

To find all active IP addresses on your LAN, regardless of OS, you can ping 
them individually, or use something like (with your own LAN subnet instead):

    nmap 192.168.333.0/24

Nmap will tell you if the machine has FTP open (port 21) which you can mount 
into your directory tree with ftpfs (http://ftpfs.sourceforge.net/ *), and 
using the -sU option it will also find potential NFS shares (port 111 is a 
hint that NFS is up), on which / will often mount (at least readonly) as a 
share using nfsmount (for details of which do `man nfs').

If your DNS is set up correctly, you can find the name of any machine 
regardless of OS using `host 192.168.333.444' (192.168.333.444 being a fake, 
sample IP to look up).

DAV can also be used to make fileshares through your webserver using davfs 
(http://dav.sourceforge.net/), but I'm not sure how to get a listing, per se, 
of available DAV shares. There are filesystem drivers around to mount the 
most amazing services and objects as if they were just another NFS share.

All of the above may be automated, with varying levels of risk, by adding 
entries to /etc/fstab.

If you have Windows clients trying to access a Linux box, particularly 
securely, WinSCP works reasonably well. It relies on PuTTY, the best 
ssh/telnet/rsh client I've ever seen on Windows.

Cheers; Leon

* Oh, wait, it's obsolete already; try http://lufs.sourceforge.net/ for a
  user-definable filesystem type which includes sshfs, cardfs (memory card,
  possibly plugged into a terminal) cefs (ie, Windows CE as a filesystem)
  and a few others.