This section is borrowed and modified from Alexander Neundorf's
README file on LISa.
KDE features two powerful servers called the Lan Information
Server (LISa) and Restricted Lan
Information Server (resLISa) which are used
to identify CIFS and other servers on your local network providing a
function similar to “Network Neighbourhood” in
Microsoft� Windows�.
Lisa only depends on the TCP/IP stack so samba configuration is not
required to make it work but the samba package is a dependency. To find
hosts on your local network you set a range of IP-Addresses in your
configuration file that Lisa will check. When you start the Lisa daemon
it will send a ICMP,
echo request message to all the IP addresses given in the configuration file
and await a response.
Note
The Lisa daemon requires root privileges to open the socket,
but once the socket has been established root privileges are immediately
dropped.
You can also execute Lisa using
nmblookup
"*"
.
Note
If you do not have the
nmblookup
program it can be found at https://www.samba.org or through packages
provided by your distribution
. The samba command
nmblookup
"*"
will send a broadcast
message to the attached network and any host that is running the
smb-services will send a reply stating that it is accepting
connections.
If your company network has very strict guidelines governing what
ports can and cannot be opened you will have to use ResLisa to communicate
with other hosts on your network. Because ResLisa cannot ping entire
networks or address ranges you will have to add each host by name to your
confiuration file. Currently you are able to add up to 64 hosts, and these
addresses are pingable.
Note
ResLisa will only provide the information over a UNIX� domain
socket, i.e. not over the network. The name of the socket is
/tmp/resLISa-
YourLoginName
,
so ResLisa can be safely run on the same machine by more than one
user.
At startup Lisa first parses the configuration file in the users
home directory under $
HOME
/.lisarc. If
this file does not exist Lisa will then look for a system wide
confiuration located at /etc/lisarc. Now for a sample
example configuration file:
PingAddresses = 192.168.100.0/255.255.255.0;192.168.100.10-192.168.199.19;192.168.200.1;
PingNames = my_host1;my_host2 #Hosts by name (required for resLISa)
AllowedAddresses = 192.168.0.0/255.255.0.0
BroadcastNetwork = 192.168.100.0/255.255.255.0
SearchUsingNmblookup = 1 #also try nmblookup
FirstWait = 30 #30 one-hundredth's of a second
SecondWait = -1 #Only try once
#SecondWait = 60 #Try twice and wait 0.6 seconds
UpdatePeriod = 300 #Update every 300 sec's
DeliverUnnamedHosts = 0 #Don't publish unnamed hosts
MaxPingsAtOnce = 256 #Send up to 256 ICMP echo requests at once
Lisa can also be configured graphically in the
->
->
item in the
menu. However, to use this option Lisa must
be started with the
-K
command line switch.
