You can connect to a network with wired and wireless connections. To view your network connection check the icon in the right part of the main panel. If you click the icon, you can see more details in the menu. Click the connection name to see more details and access the settings.

Whether and to what 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 meet with your expectations, contact your system administrator to ensure 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 Desktop is configured for tight security and has a firewall that protects your machine against the Internet. To adjust the firewall configuration, you would either need to ask your system administrator to put your interface into the internal zone or to tear down the firewall entirely (depending on your company's security policy). If you try to browse a network with a restrictive firewall running on your machine, Nautilus warns you that your security restrictions are not allowing it to query the network.

Networking workstations can be set up to share directories. Typically, files and directories are marked to allow users remote access. 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. Your level of access to the shared directories (whether read-only or write access, as well) is dependent on the permissions granted to you by the owner of the shares.

To access network shares, open Nautilus and click Browse Network from the Places pane. Nautilus displays the servers and networks that you can access. Double-click a server or network to access its shares. You might be required to authenticate to the server by providing a user name and password. Common network shares are SFTP-accessible resources (SSH File Transfer Protocol) or Windows shares.

Figure 5.1: Network File Browser #

Sharing and exchanging documents is a must-have in corporate environments. Nautilus offers you file sharing, which makes your files and directories available to both Linux and Windows users.

5.4.2 Enabling Sharing for a Directory #

To configure file sharing for a directory:

1. Open Nautilus.

2. Right-click a directory, then select Sharing Options from the context menu.

   

3. Select Share this folder.

4. If you want other people to be able to write to the directory, select Allow other people to write in this folder. To allow access for people without a user account check Guest Access.

5. Click Create Share.

6. If the directory does not already have the permissions that are required for sharing, a dialog appears. Click Add the permissions automatically.

The directory icon changes to indicate that the directory is now shared.

Important: 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.

With your SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop machine being an Active Directory client, you can browse, view and manipulate data located on Windows servers. The following examples are the most prominent ones:

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

To create directories in your Windows user directory using Nautilus, proceed as you would when creating a Linux directory.

Being part of a corporate network and authenticating against a Windows Active Directory server, you can access corporate resources such as printers. GNOME 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, select it from the list of available printers.