Two Simple Questions (Multi Home)

MCCALL,DON (HP-USA,ex1) don_mccall at hp.com
Fri Mar 16 14:01:28 GMT 2001


Hello Julia,
On question 1&2, yes, nmbd will register it's netbios names ONLY on the 
1st ip address in a subnet.  If you have additional ip addresses IN THE
SAME SUBNET, it will disgard them.  It does this because to NOT do it would
cause netbios name collisions, and name resolution issues.
And since you are on the same subnet anyway, the only load balancing that 
you would accomplish is the thruput on the NICS, since the WIRE is going 
to have the same traffic either way - in fact, since netbios browsing is 
so 'chatty', your actual network bandwidth (on the wire) would increase if
you were able to do this.
If you are thinking that you need to do 'load balancing' you imply that 
you are experiencing some sort of performance issues; you should make sure
that the NIC is really the bottleneck; not the cpu/disk resources that 
samba is using based on the amount of traffic it is having to handle, or 
the amount of traffic physically on the wire - perhaps you really DO need 
to subnet.
Hope this helps,
Don
-----Original Message-----
From: Julia Holloway [mailto:jhllwy at us.ibm.com]
Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2001 5:56 PM
To: samba at us5.samba.org
Subject: Two Simple Questions (Multi Home)


Dear Samba List,

I have been reading the archives for mention of multi-homed Samba, and
Samba over multiple subnets.  I have two questions:

1) It is true that the nmbd daemon will only allow one IP address per
subnet to be added to the local interface list?   So if I had a Linux
machine with two NIC cards connecting to the same HUB, using the same
subnet, only one of these interfaces will be used?

2) What I was hoping to do is set up my Samba server as a multi-homed
server, with multiple addresses on the same subnet.  Then I was going to
let my WINS server (or DNS for that matter) function as a simple load
balancer, so that the client requests could be spread over the different
NIC cards.   Is there anyone else that would be interested in a setup like
this, besides me??

3) On another subject,  I notice that when I allow my NT4 Server to be the
local master browser, the entry "__MSBROWSE__-[01h]" can be found in the
WINS server database.  However, if I let the Samba server become the local
master browser, there is no "__MSBROWSE__" entry.  Has anyone else noticed
this?  Is this a problem??

Julie Holloway
T/L 444 - 0056, ext  (919) 254 - 0056
IBM Storage Networking

email: jhllwy at us.ibm.com


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