Tutorial – How to Know the Network (nonbiblically?)

Dear Readers,

(Specifically readers who are using computers running Mac OS X.)

If you’ve done the generous thing and set up SMB sharing using SharePoints, you might wonder how you can keep tabs on the usage of your files. There’s a quick and easy way of doing this: the terminal. Simply enter the command “smbstatus” and hit return to see a list of people connected to your machine. In most cases, smbstatus will resolve the IP for you and you’ll end up with a person’s wesmail name along with whatever files they happen to by copying at the time.

Ever wanted to email the purveyors of the digital goods on the network to tell them thanks, or to put their goddamned files back up, or felt just a little curious about who the guy with 20gigs of hamster porn happens to be? Well you’re in luck because there’s another great little command for that.

OS X comes with a whole suite of sambatools, all hiding out down there in your terminal, but the one you want is called “nmblookup” and it works like this:

“nmblookup -T SOMENETWORKNAME” (enter)
and it’ll tell you something like this
querying SOMENETWORKNAME on 129.133.159.255
jdoe.stu.wesleyan.edu, 129.133.143.blah SOMENETWORKNAME<00>

Neat, yes? (I just found the -T argument that does the DNS lookup for you, and was excited.) Now you can go facebook jdoe@wesleyan.edu or just Doe. And be creepy like that.

Love,
me

P.S. If you want to know how to set Sharepoints up correctly, just stare at these helpful diagrams:
Step 1 , Step 2

P.P.S. For people in woodframe houses: I think this might work. First, be sure that VPN is up and running, then go to terminal and form your query like this:

nmblookup -B 129.133.159.225 -T SOMENETWORKNAME

It should use that IP as the broadcast server and return to you a handy IP address along with the person’s jdoe.stu thing. Tell me if this works.