SMB also uses the concept of groups, with which machines can register themselves. Earlier, we mentioned that the machines in our example belonged to a
workgroup, which is a partition of machines on the same network. For example, a business might very easily have an ACCOUNTING and a SALES workgroup, each with different servers and printers. In the Windows world, a workgroup and an SMB group are the same thing.
Continuing our NBTSTAT example, the
hydra Samba server is also a member of the SIMPLE workgroup (the GROUP attribute hex 00), and will stand for election as a browse master (GROUP attribute 1E). Here is the remainder of the NBTSTAT utility output:
NetBIOS Remote Machine Name Table, continued
Name Type Status
---------------------------------------------
SIMPLE <00> GROUP Registered
SIMPLE <1E> GROUP Registered
.._ _MSBROWSE_ _.<01> GROUP Registered
The possible group attributes a machine can have are illustrated in
Table 1.3. More information is available in Windows NT in a Nutshell by Eric Pearce, also published by O'Reilly.
Table 1.3: NetBIOS Group Resource Types
|
Named Resource |
Hexidecimal Byte Value |
|
Standard Workstation group |
00 |
|
Logon Server |
1C |
|
Master Browser name |
1D |
|
Normal Group name (used in browser elections) |
1E |
|
Internet Group name (administrative) |
20 |
|
<01><02>_ _MSBROWSE_ _<02> |
01 |
The final entry,
_ _ MSBROWSE _ _ , is used to announce a group to other master browsers. The nonprinting characters in the name show up as dots in a NBTSTAT printout. Don't worry if you don't understand all of the resource or group types. Some of them you will not need with Samba, and others you will pick up as you move through the rest of the chapter. The important thing to remember here is the logistics of the naming mechanism.
