These guidelines can be applied to a Slackware 13.x. The tests were carried out on several local networks, in particular a "promiscuous lan" with a Windows 200x domain server, 70 PCs with XP/Vista, some Slackware/Linux, 20 iMac Leopard.

The problem

Seems that, in recent versions of samba, with Konqueror or Dolphin we cannot correctly browse the Windows network, we get only workgroups names but not PCs names. Also command "findsmb" not works, sometime returns 0.0.0.0 as IP, other times remains waiting for long time and returns only a few names. The problem seems exist also in some installations of Slackware 12.x.

Why this? Here are some tests:

1. with active gateway (and an opendns as nameserver) we get:

lsof | grep smb

smbclient 2358       root    9u     IPv4     173611      0t0        TCP 192.168.0.210:49569->hit-nxdomain.opendns.com:netbios-ssn (SYN_SENT)

that is we obtain a timeout in browsing Windows network, due a DNS timeout

1. infact, removing gateway (command "route del default") we obtain:

lsof | grep smb

kio_smb   2159       root   18u     IPv4      12060      0t0        TCP localhost:40561->localhost:netbios-ssn (ESTABLISHED)
kio_smb   2159       root   19u     IPv4      12789      0t0        TCP localhost:35236->localhost:microsoft-ds (ESTABLISHED

and samba works right !!!

In default smb.conf (smb.conf-sample) there is the correct line that inhibits dnslookup in names resolution but this line seems not sufficient.

   dns proxy = no

The solution

To resolve:

1. add this line to /etc/samba/smb.conf (in [global]):

   name resolve order = wins lmhosts bcast host

and restart PC (not simply restart samba service) ... samba works now ... great !!!