Is there any sofware in fedora for searching a particular file over a local area network(about 200 systems) as is LANSCAN in windows ..... I tried nmap and also tried using lanscan through wine it didn help ...

THANKS A LOT!!!!

Could you explain the problem in a bit more detail? I'm not familiar with Lanscan, but it appears to do something a bit different to nmap, so I'm not clear on what you need...

Ok i can explain it to you with an example ... At my institute i am having approximately 200 systems on LAN ....Now suppose i want to search for a file named "hello" on network . For this in windows i just have to put the word in lanscan search and it scans and displays the various systems having files which either include the keyword "hello" or are "hello" only. I hope this makes clear what im looking for

What sort of network file sharing is being used on this network ??

ie. NFS, FTP, SAMBA ... etc.

Yes, that makes sense. I believe that the Beagle desktop search has been extended to index files across a network, but I don't know how - it may be a custom service or plug-in.

Actually requesting complete file listings from 200 different systems each time would not be very good for your network, so presumably Lanscan checks the shares occasionally, and caches the lists of files. Desktop search works the same way.

You could certainly write a plugin for Beagle or Tracker if one doesn't exist, or make a script in any language that gets lists of the files on each share and stores them in a SQLite database.

majority of the people are using windows so samba shares only