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I don't need any broadcasting/autodiscovery, everything is deterministic and strictly configured in my nets. I drop trash SAMBA broadcasts by firewall anyway, can't I just disable them to keep my network traffic clean?

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1. You wil get better answers if you indicate your OS and version, and Samba version as well. 2. Does Samba generate enough broadcast traffic that it actually causes anything bad to happen? In other words, why are you worried about this? –  mfinni Jun 29 '10 at 2:05
No problem there is, but I'd like only meaningful traffic to take place - just for tidiness. The OS is Ubuntu 10.04 Serer x64, SAMBA is the standard one from the repo. –  Ivan Jun 29 '10 at 4:49

2 Answers 2

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Kill nmbd

edit your rc/init scripts that launch smbd and nmbd so they don't run nmbd. nmbd is the automatic discovery component of samba. Disabling it will cut down on the traffic.


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In Debian at least, you could use the option 'disable netbios = yes' in your smb.conf file. I think this is a better option than edit the init scripts. This way you will not have to edit the init scripts every time they get overwritten by upgrades.

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