gnomba 0.5.1

Copyright (C) 1999 Chris Rogers, Brian Nigito

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.  The workgroups, machines and share are shown in a tree-view.
For each machine you can then view the list of shares, and mount, unmount
or browse them. 

Homepage:   http://gnomba.darkcorner.net/
Source:     http://gnomba.darkcorner.net/tars/gnomba-0.5.1.tar.gz
6.0 RPMs:   http://gnomba.darkcorner.net/6.0/
5.2 RPMs:   http://gnomba.darkcorner.net/5.2/
Deb Binary: http://gnomba.darkcorner.net/deb/

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.  

If you glance at the TODO list, you'll see that we still have a lot to do.
Any help or suggestions are welcome.  

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

-First of all, netbui is not 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. Now when the dns names and nmb names are the same
this is not a problem. However when they are not matched 1 to 1, it
doesn't work at all.  Several of the other gui smb browsers for Linux
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.

