January 17, 2003

Teaching the finder about WINS (NetBIOS name) servers

Did a little more poking around, and I now have a way to get the finder Command-K Connect to server... dialog to use a WINS server. You need to make a file in your home directory called .nsmbrc and put this in it:

[default]
nbns = ip.addr.of.wins

There are probably other useful options to use here as well, but that was enough to get smb://foreignmachine/share to work. The 'detail' view of that dialog box (with the servers that fill in) won't fill in from the WINS server, so you need to know the name of the machine.

Posted by nsayer at January 17, 2003 08:27 AM
Comments

IF you set the correct domain in the SMB settings within Directory Access, that will also allow you to use netbios names when connecting via cmd-k

As a side note, you can see a list of all netbios machines and their ip addresses by using the findsmb command in the terminal.

Posted by: Brontojoris at August 3, 2004 04:23 PM