More questions about WINS, interfaces, etc

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Thu, 18 Sep 1997, Philip A. Prindeville wrote:

> > On Thu, 18 Sep 1997, Philip A. Prindeville wrote:
> > 
> > > I have yet another question about WINS and DNS...  Why can't the
> > > DNS be used as the database of reference for name-to-address
> > > mappings when using NB over TCP/IP?
> > 
> > we're working on that, for samba-2.
> 
> I would be interested in collaborating on that.

good stuff.  the author of this stuff is a biologist at heart (proteins 
and enzymes).  this shows in his coding style: higher order functions, 
and modularisation and stuff.

writing a module that uses LDAP for NetBIOS name resolution, or one that 
limits WINS names to have to match up with DNS names, are just two of the 
possibilities.
 
> > cacheing, to reduce network traffic.  also, nmbd is a single process.  
> > we'd need to add a non-blocking, state-based way to resolve dns names.  
> > (gethostbyname() is blocking...)
> 
> At least under Solaris, there is a thread-safe gethostbyname_r()
> function that could be used.  I don't know how portable this is,
> though.

wossat, then?  how does it work?  why would i want it to be thread-safe
when we only have one (state-based/higher-order-function-based) thread in
nmbd? 
 
> > all the time.  we prefer diff -u, if you can generate it.  patch < 
> > diff_file usually deals with things automatically, and creates .rej files 
> > for rejected bits, which have to be added by hand - no problem there.
> 
> Hmmmm...  My diff doesn't understand -u.  Where can I get one that
> does?

gnu diff should do the job.  if you can't get it, don't worry.
 
> > > you can say something
> > > like:
> > > 
> > > 	interfaces = le0 le1
> > > 
> > > or
> > > 
> > > 	interfaces = all
> > 
> > oh, _good_!  an excellent addition.
> 
> I'm just not sure about one thing, however:  in the original code
> they seem to ignore the broadcast address and force the address to
> be the all-ones host address.  Which is what the broadcast address
> should be anyway, unless you have misconfigured or incredibly old
> machines.

you can configure NT to use zeros based broadcasts.

luke


Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton (lkcl at switchboard.net)
Web site under construction  (http://mailhost.cb1.com/~lkcl)
"Deal with difficult problems while they are still easy"