Connecting to NT Postoffices

[d23]

Okay, earlier I asked about connecting to my company NT4 PDC and was handed the local NHF on Samba configuration. Great NHF, and I must say I'm dissapointed to see how much valuable information from that NHF appears nowhere in O'Reilly's Using Samba - amazing what $35 USD DOESN'T buy you. Anyway...

Now that people can see me on the network, I have two questions:

1. How do I browse the rest of the network (ala. Network Neighborhood) the same way I used to in my 9x/2000 box?

2. How do I get my mail program (I'm using K Mail right now) to connect to the local MS postoffice on the server? I can get it to grab external mail from pop3 servers so I've got that part down at least, but I'm not sure how to get hooked up to my mailbox on the server. Can I even use the PAB and PST mailbox files I was using with Exchange?

[MaxWave]

Question 1: If you use KDE you can try Komba. http://zeus.fh-brandenburg.de/~schwanz/php/komba.php3
I haven't tried it so I won't recommend it. I use the smbclient command.

Question 2: POP3, and IMAP are the only 2 ways I know you can get Exchange mail in Linux. I use the web based OWA with Netscape 6.1. It sucks compared to Windows' MS Outlook but its better than a simple IMAP client. Maybe someday M$ will make a MAPI client for Linux (yeah right!).

[d23]

Hmmm, can't seem to get through on that link. Any idea where else I could get this GUI browsing ability?

I'll take a look at the SMBCLIENT instead, but I can feel this man page already starting to give me a headache. Ah the man page. Precious, yet deadly.

[MaxWave]

I simply type the following to see what shares are available on a certain computer.

smbclient -L computername

computername needs to be in your /etc/hosts file.

This gives me a list of shares.

[d23]

So I'm going to have to put all 150+ machines in the building into my hosts file?

[Craig McPherson]

Originally posted by d23:
<STRONG>So I'm going to have to put all 150+ machines in the building into my hosts file?</STRONG>

I personally don't see a problem with simply listing the IP of every machine on earth in a giant hosts file, but I've heard that those crazy college kids at Berkeley have developed some sort of new-fangled name resolution system called "DNS". It sounds pretty crazy to me -- looking up IPs from a "name server" instead of just keeping them in a big hosts file? It'll never fly. The "DNS" thing is actually starting to catch on with some people, though: as I understand it, a lot of sites are using it now, and some people believe that someday the entire ARPANet will be using DNS. Yeah, that'll happen -- the day the governor of Arkansas or Texas becomes President of the United States. Heh heh heh.

[chikn]

Originally posted by Craig McPherson:
<STRONG>I personally don't see a problem with simply listing the IP of every machine on earth in a giant hosts file, but I've heard that those crazy college kids at Berkeley have developed some sort of new-fangled name resolution system called "DNS". It sounds pretty crazy to me -- looking up IPs from a "name server" instead of just keeping them in a big hosts file? It'll never fly. The "DNS" thing is actually starting to catch on with some people, though: as I understand it, a lot of sites are using it now, and some people believe that someday the entire ARPANet will be using DNS. Yeah, that'll happen -- the day the governor of Arkansas or Texas becomes President of the United States. Heh heh heh.</STRONG>

I never add host file entries, they arent necessary.

[Craig McPherson]

Look!
Up in the sky!
It's a bird!
No, it's a plane!
No, it's sarcasm flying directly over your head!

Thank you, Captain Obvious, for the great service you've done for your country.

Sigh.

[chikn]

Sarcasm or vague and somewhat cryptic to the questioner?

[d23]

Okay, I'd laugh off the sarcasm if I even knew what to do once I saw it was a joke. I know what a DNS server does and I know our DNS server addresses BUT they're not ours, they're somewhere outside the building. I don't really know anything about DNS servers or how to use DNS to do what it is I want here. Perhaps we could put the sarcasms in a sock for the moment and let the newb in on the big secret. Seriously, I'm interested in knowing. Think down to my level here. You got 8000+ posts, I got 40+.

[d23]

Okay, just updating this thread in case somebody searches. I managed to use:

smbclient -L &lt;pdc server's name&gt;

to get a list of all the 9x systems on the network. I then put a system I wanted to connect to into the hosts.conf file. smbclient connected to it no problem then (not sure if I even needed the entry in hosts, but who knows). That was:

smbclient //9X_BOX/SHARE_NAME

Finally, wanting to make it an actual virtual file system on my own system, I used mount to create it as a /mnt file system using the smbfs option like so:

mount -t smbfs -o username=&lt;my nt login&gt;,password=&lt;my nt login password&gt; //9X_BOX/SHARE_NAME /mnt/newshare

"newshare" being a premade spot to mount it into. Now I guess I can mount all the open shares on the network and get a sort of slaphappy version of Network Neighbourhood, or at least the shares on the network. In the case of the network I'm on, all the shares are static, so I don't have to worry too much about them changing over time.

The rest of you are probably saying to yourselves, "um yeah? like so what you loser", but quite frankly, I hopped around the office making little gang signs with my hands and acting like an idiot - I was far too happy.