I have sent an email to the Samba Team but this does not only concern them but the Linux Community:
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Hello Samba Team,

I have used Linux for about 2 months now and have been sharing files through Samba. I have also gone far into changing our NT Server to Samba PDC.

Everything works fine for all Win9x clients except for one workgroup composed of WinXP and Win9x. I have created a machine account for WinXP and have to observe what happens now.

Now for the security. I have a Linux box connected to the network but no shares defined. It can view the network and access shares but I noticed that this Linux SMB Client does not register itself to the PDC. When I check on WIN9x Network Neighborhood it's not shown.

I believe this is a big issue and can cause security breach in the network. As an administrator, you would want to know what computers are connected in your network. In big organization this could be hard to track.

Since Linux advocates security I think all smb client should give the netbios name as specified in the smb.conf file. Any computer that does not pass through this policy should be considered hacking the network.

However, it's really hard to track down who's at fault here. Could it be Nautilus accessing network smb server bypassing the smbclient lib?

I have already expressed a strong standardization of Linux services or libs. Linux programs can interoperate more if standards have been set.

NBJayme