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 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, Konqueror warns you about your security restrictions not allowing it to query the network.

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.

To access network shares, click the Network Browsing icon on your desktop or open Konqueror and enter remote:/ in the location bar. Konqueror then opens a virtual folder that displays the network share types that you can access. Click a network resource type then click the network share to access. You might be required to authenticate to the resource by providing a username and password.

Figure 9.1. Network Browsing¶

Sharing and exchanging documents is a must-have in corporate environments. Konqueror offers you file sharing with Samba, which makes your files and folders available to both Linux and Windows users. To configure Samba file sharing with Konqueror, proceed as follows:

Other members of your network can reach your share by entering smb:/ in the location bar of Konqueror and clicking the appropriate workgroup icon and hostname.

Samba Domain Browsing

Samba domain browsing only works if your system's firewall is configured accordingly. Either disable the firewall entirely or assign the browsing interface to the internal firewall zone. Ask your system administrator about how to proceed. This procedure is described in more detail in Section “Configuring a Linux Client for Active Directory” (Chapter 12, Active Directory Support, ↑Deployment Guide).

With your SUSE Linux Enterprise machine being an Active Directory client as described in Chapter Active Directory Support (↑Deployment Guide), you can browse, view, and manipulate data located on Windows servers. The following examples are just the most prominent ones:

To access your Windows data using Konqueror, proceed as follows:

To create folders in your Windows user folder using Konqueror, proceed as you would when creating a Linux folder:

To create a file on the AD server, proceed as described in the following example for the Kate text editor.

Make use of Konqueror's Single-Sign-On support, as in the following example—Web access to your MS Exchange mailbox:

Being part of a corporate network and authenticating against a Windows Active Directory server, you can access corporate resources, such as printers. KDE allows you to configure printing from your Linux client to a Windows network printer.

To configure a Windows network printer for use through your Linux workstation, proceed as follows:

To print to the Windows network printer configured above, just select it from the list of available printers in KPrinter.

With KNetAttach, you can also add new network folders to this view by clicking Add a Network Folder in a Konqueror remote:/ view. A wizard opens where you can select the type of network folder to access and enter the details, such as a name for the network folder, the address of the server (either the IP address or domain name), the login name, the port, and the path to folder to access.

Figure 9.11. Adding a Network Folder¶

After finishing, you can access the network share in Konqueror by clicking the newly created link instead of entering a lengthy URL for this share in the location bar.

Figure 9.12. New Network Folder¶

If you add a network folder in this way, you can also access this folder easily when opening or saving a file from a KDE application. If you click Network Folders in the left-hand bar of an Open File or a Save File dialog, the network folder you added appears.

Figure 9.13. Opening a File from a Network Share¶

Linking to Network Shares on the Desktop

For quick access to network shares you need very often, you can also create links to these resources on your desktop. To do so, select the desired resource in Konqueror and drag it onto your desktop while keeping the left mouse button pressed. From the context menu, select Link Here. A new icon appears on your desktop. If you click that icon, Konqueror opens and displays the content of this directory.

The kpf utility provides simple file sharing using HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol), which is the same protocol used by Web sites to provide data to your Web browser. kpf is strictly a public file server, which means that there are no access restrictions to shared files. Whatever you select for sharing is available to anyone.

Security Considerations

Before setting up a file server with kpf, check with your system administrator whether your company's security policies allow this. You should never set up a file server in a corporate or private environment if you are not entirely sure that your network is protected by an outer firewall. Otherwise you might risk accidentally leaking sensitive information to the Web. In addition to that, any Web server is a potential target for hacker's exploits. Setting up a Web server in a secure way is a very hard job and kpf was not designed to act as such a Web server.

kpf is designed to be used for sharing files with friends, not to act as a fully-fledged Web server like Apache. kpf was primarily conceived as an easy way to share files with others while chatting on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, or chat rooms).

kpf is typically set up to serve files from a public_html folder in your home directory. For example, if you want to make a file available to some people with whom you are chatting online, you can use kpf to copy the file into your public_html folder and announce to those listening that your file is available at http://HOSTNAME:8001/thefile (rather than send them each an e-mail with the file attached).

Other parties wishing to connect to this server should just enter a URL like http://HOSTNAME:8001 into their browsers. An overview of the published content is displayed.

Figure 9.15. Published Contents

On the hosting machine, you can monitor the network traffic on your file server by right-clicking the globe icon and selecting Monitor. A short set of statistics similar to the following is given.

Figure 9.16. File Server Statistics