Novell LINUX ENTERPRISE DESKTOP 10 SP1 - GNOME 23-05-2007, Manual

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Accessing Network Resources
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Accessing Network Resources
From your desktop, you can access files and directories or certain services on remote hosts or make
your own files and directories available to other users in your network. SUSE
®
Linux* Enterprise
Desktop offers various different ways of accessing and creating network shared resources. This
section covers the following information:
Š Section 8.1, “General Notes on File Sharing and Network Browsing,” on page 169
Š
Section 8.2, “Accessing Network Shares,” on page 169
Š Section 8.3, “Sharing Folders,” on page 170
Š
Section 8.4, “Managing Windows Files,” on page 171
Š Section 8.5, “Configuring and Accessing a Windows Network Printer,” on page 172
8.1 General Notes on File Sharing and Network
Browsing
Whether and to which extent you can use file sharing and network browsing on your machine and in
your network highly depends on the network structure and on the configuration of your machine.
Before setting up either of them, contact your system administrator to make sure that your network
structure supports this feature and to check whether your company's security policies permit it.
Network browsing, be it SMB browsing for Windows shares or SLP browsing for remote services,
relies heavily on the machine's ability to send broadcast messages to all clients in the network. These
messages and the clients' replies to them enable your machine to detect any available shares or
services. For broadcasts to work effectively, your machine must be part of the same subnet as all
other machines it is querying. If network browsing does not work on your machine or the detected
shares and services do not match with what you expected, contact your system administrator to
make sure that you are connected to the appropriate subnet.
To allow network browsing, your machine needs to keep several network ports open to send and
receive network messages that provide details on the network and the availability of shares and
services. The standard SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop is configured for tight security and has a
firewall up and running that protects your machine against the Internet. To adjust the firewall
configuration, you would either need to ask your system administrator to open a certain set of ports
to the network or to tear down the firewall entirely according to your company's security policy. If
you try to browse a network with a restrictive firewall running on your machine, Nautilus warns you
about your security restrictions not allowing it to query the network.
8.2 Accessing Network Shares
Networking workstations can be set up to share folders. Typically, files and folders are marked to let
remote users access them. These are called
network shares . If your system is configured to access
network shares, you can use your file manager to access these shares and browse them just as easily
as if they were located on your local machine. Whether you have only read access or also write
access to the shared folders depends on the permissions granted to you by the owner of the shares.