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From your desktop, you can access files and directories or certain services on remote hosts or make your own files and directories available to other users in your network. openSUSE® offers various different ways of accessing and creating network shared resources:
Your file managers, Dolphin or Konqueror, let you browse your network for shared resources and services. Learn more about this in Section 5.2, “Accessing Network Shares”.
Using Dolphin or Konqueror, configure your files and folders to share with other members in your network. Make your data readable or writable for users from any Windows or Linux workstation. Learn more about this in Section 5.3, “Sharing Folders in Mixed Environments”.
openSUSE can be configured to integrate into an existing Windows network. Your Linux machine then behaves like a Windows client. It takes all account information from the Active Directory domain controller, just as Windows clients do. Learn more about this in Section 5.4, “Managing Windows Files”.
![]() | Network Share Support in Dolphin |
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Dolphin is KDE 4's default file manager and most of the network functions described in this chapter are already integrated. However not all of them might work flawlessly—if in doubt, try using Konqueror instead. |
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 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 openSUSE 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, Dolphin warns you about security restrictions not allowing it to query the network.