Samba, WINS, many subnets, etc

[Brandon Hume]

> The problem you'll have with this is that lmhosts like hosts needs to be distributed
> to all machines.

Is it possible to declare the samba server as the WINS server for all machines
(which can be done via DHCP), and then prime the running samba with an lmhosts
generated via the DNS database?  What would happen if a machine with a given
IP tried to register itself with a different name than what the WINS server
is told it should be via lmhosts?

> If you only have a small number of servers that all the clients are connecting
> to, you could distribute a limited lmhosts to all the client machines.

I was thinking a single server doing WINS, probably around 2500 active clients
at a given time.  The server in mind is fairly mighty, I'm not overly worried
about load right now.

I think the goal is mainly to let the clients connect to each other, and see
one another in Network Neighborhood.  (I've warned my superiors about the
vague reliability of NN).

> The thing you have to remember with all this is that the client determines it's
> own name, and workgroup.  This is NOT controlled from any central server.

That's what I've been mentioning to the people encouraging me in this project.

> Another thing you could look at at least with the NT boxes is using the
> "use DNS to resolve windows names" option.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of the machines are Win95/98.