Samba
Samba is a program which allows "Network Neighborhood"-style communication between Linux and Windows. It is named after the SMB protocol, which is what Windows uses for "Network Neighborhood" communication.
How To
Restart the Samba Server
If you have Fedora Core, there's a convenient little "services" application you can use to restart Samba and several dozen other services. For the rest of us, however, there's a command you have to execute from a root terminal.
On Ubuntu, and probably other Debian-based systems:
/etc/init.d/samba restart
On Red Hat, I'm told the command would be:
/sbin/samba restart
(Possibly substituting "smb" for "samba"; ls the directory in question to find a list of services.) This is the same general technique used for restarting services, which should itself probably be documented somewhere. (The Samba share configuration GUI program really ought to have a "restart Samba server" button, though, even if it does this automatically when you change parameters -- because there is no way to know if it is doing this otherwise.)
Get DNS to Recognize NetBIOS Names
I haven't actually figured this one out yet; I've seen several workable solutions, but they all seem hideously complicated. This shouldn't be a difficult problem.
One possible phrasing of the problem, for purists: How can we add {NetBIOS's knowledge of machine names on the network} to the available domain space? This is needed so that commands which accept a domain name as input (e.g. ftp, ssh, mysql) can accept a machine name instead, removing the necessity to manually look up the machine's IP address.
One useful bit of information: the command nmblookup will accept a NetBIOS name and return an IP address.
Reference
- Wikipedia:Samba software
- Wikipedia:Server Message Block: SMB protocol
Links
- Managing Samba: Choose your weapon -- Windows network ID basics: seems to cover some useful concepts