samba, netbios-ssn and a chatty win xp home box.

checkmate3001 · 09-13-2008, 12:21 AM

Hello peeps!

I got a samba server running to share a printer. My g/f has a window xp home machine. Everything seems fine as far as that goes.

My question is this:
I see a lot of traffic coming from her machine even when she isn't on it. It all seems to come from ports starting in the 2000 or so range and slowly increasing. Every packet that is sent to my machine is to port 139. So it looks like that is netbios.

So is it normal for windows xp to be so chatty? Why does it keep contacting my machine? I could understand if something changed on the network or something, but neither of us will be on the machines and it keeps talking away...

I guess my concern is that I didn't set something up right and windows is asking my samba server for something and it isn't listening or responding.

billymayday · 09-13-2008, 04:58 PM

Here's a quote from the well known sample iptables scripts at http://iptables-tutorial.frozentux.net/

Quote:

#
# In Microsoft Networks you will be swamped by broadcasts. These lines
# will prevent them from showing up in the logs.
#

$IPTABLES -A udp_packets -p UDP -i $INET_IFACE -d $INET_BROADCAST \
--dport 135:139 -j DROP