Virtual servers are a technique for creating the illusion of multiple NetBIOS servers on the network, when in reality there is only one. The technique is simple to implement: a machine simply registers more than one NetBIOS name in association with its IP address. There are tangible benefits to doing this.
The accounting department, for example, might have an
accounting server, and clients of it would see just the accounting disks and printers. The marketing department could have their own server,
marketing, with their own reports, and so on. However, all the services would be provided by one medium-sized Unix workstation (and one relaxed administrator), instead of having one small server and one administrator per department.
Samba will allow a Unix server to use more than one NetBIOS name with the
netbios
aliases option. See
Table 4.6.
