## Windows Shares

### Introduction

In many small local area networks, the SMB protocol is used to offer network services. Names like &Windows; Network or &Windows; for Workgroups Network or LanManager are often used as well. Using SMB you can access so-called shares (&ie; folders made available by the server) as well as printers.

&kde; comes with built-in support for the SMB protocol. As &kde; is network-transparent that means you can access SMB shares from everywhere you can access your local files, for example in the &konqueror; file manager and in the file dialogue. To make use of this you should provide &kde; with some information on your SMB network. But do not worry, this is normally pretty simple as, for example, all the Windows clients in your network need and have the same information.

For the SMB protocol to work, it is required to have Samba correctly installed. If you have an NT domain controller, you will need at least Samba version 2.0 or higher. If you want to access &Windows; 2000 shares, you will need Samba version 2.0.7 or higher. Older versions may work too, but have not been tested.

### Use

Although there are a lot of insecure SMB networks out there which allow access to anyone, in principle you have to authenticate yourself to access the services of an SMB server. By default, &kde; will use the data entered in the Default user name and Default password fields to authenticate itself on SMB hosts. If you leave the field Default user name empty, &kde; will try to access SMB hosts without a username. If you leave the default password empty, it will try without a password. If &kde; is unsuccessful accessing the host using these settings, you will be asked for a username and a password.

While it makes things more comfortable if &kde; stores your SMB password, this may be a security problem. If you are using SMB in a security conscious environment, you should not store your password here but rather enter it anew every time you need to access an SMB host.

In the Workgroup field, you can enter your workgroup name. If you don't know it, ask your system administrator or have a look at other already configured machines in your network. However, in most cases providing the workgroup name is not required, so you probably can also leave this empty.

If the option Show hidden shares is checked, shares ending with a $ will be shown.