Problem, possibly new for 2.2.0, with lmhosts

[Craig Johnson - IT Technology Office Pointyhead]

Fair enough, the docs need to clarify that a little though. Tony and I have 
been chasing this for most of a week now thinking we were doing something 
wrong (Windows 98's inconsistent behaviour has been clouding the issue). 
The static WINS stuff would be _really_ nice to have.

Cheers,

Craig

--On Wednesday, 23 May 2001 9:15 AM -0500 Steve Langasek 
<vorlon at netexpress.net> wrote:

> On Wed, 23 May 2001, Tony Shepherd wrote:
>
>> Andrew Bartlett wrote:
>
>> > >   What we expected to happen is that the wins server would
>> > > attempt to discover the address, fail to find it in dns
>> > > (dns proxy) but would find it in lmhosts.  This is not at
>> > > all what happens.
>
>> > >   On re-reading the caveats on -H in the nmbd(8) man page, I see that
>> > > it says "this file are NOT used by nmbd to answer any name
>> > > queries. Adding a line to this file affects name NetBIOS resolution
>> > > from this host ONLY.".
>> > >   I'm puzzled: this caveat isn't in smb.conf(5), which says that
>> > > "This option is used by the programs in the Samba suite to determine
>> > > what naming services to use and in what order to resolve host names
>> > > to IP addresses."
>
>> > But only when samba is operating as a client, /etc/resolv.conf and
>> > /etc/nsswitch.conf don't affect DNS do they?  I think this is the same
>> > idea.
>
>> but if the resolv.conf file says to search in order files dns, it at
>> least looks at the entries contained in the /etc/hosts file when I try
>> and connect using telnet to a site "jim".  In this case, telnet is the
>> client, and /etc/hosts provides the imformation.  This is what I would
>> have expected to happen in the case of using lmhosts
>
> But the *DNS server* that you're running on your machine does not use
> /etc/hosts when responding to DNS requests from other machines.  Clients
> on the local machine use /etc/hosts; nothing else does.
>
> The use of lmhosts is nicely parallel to this, and quite by design.  It's
> also what Microsoft does.  If you want your WINS server to advertise
> names that are configured statically in a config file, then you need
> static WINS entries, not lmhosts entries.  There are good reasons why
> both types of records are needed, and why they are kept separate.
>
>
> Unfortunately, I don't believe nmbd implements static WINS entries at this
> time.  At the very least, it doesn't seem to be documented anywhere
> obvious.
>
> If someone were going to implement this, I would suggest using a separate
> config file in $(sysconfdir) that gets pulled into wins.dat by nmbd on
> startup (with an appropriate flag to indicate the entries are static).
> This ensures that the static entries survive events such as corruption of
> wins.dat or the occasional rogue deletion by an administrator.
>
> Steve Langasek
> postmodern programmer



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 Rev. Craig Johnson              SunIT CTO Pointyhead
 Sun Microsystems                Email: Craig.Johnson at Aus.Sun.COM
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