[Samba] Samba spanning subnets

[John H Terpstra]

On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Matt Schillinger wrote:

> First off, it sounds like what you have is a WINS issue, not a PDC
> issue.
>
> All you have to do is have a server designated as the 'WINS Server'
>
> aside from other configuration items, smb.conf should have 'wins server
> = yes'

No! You need "wins support = yes", the "wins server = x.x.x.x" is used to
tell samba to use a WINS server that is running on another machine (either
NT/2K or samba).

>
> on the other 2 subnets, have 1 machine / subnet act as a wins proxy
>
> wins proxy = <ip address of main WINS SERVER>

Please do a "man smb.conf" and look for the correct syntax of "wins proxy"
It takes only a 'Yes' of 'No'.

>
> Then they will forward their subnet's netbios info to the primary WINS
> Server.

No, not quite! Incorrect explanation. Sorry.

The MS Windows machines need to be configured to use the WINS server. That
is the secret.

>
> >From there, all you have to do is have all of your clients point their
> wins server to <IP Addres of main WINS Server>

Correct, that will help a great deal.

> There is another solution that is a little easier, yet requires you to
> have a setup so that 1 machine can connect to all three subnets (3 nic
> cards)..
>
> In this case, just setup 'wins server = yes', and point all your clients
> to the appropriate ip address (you can point clients to a local subnet
> interface, or just point to one of the interfaces), and you will have a
> browseable network.

No, sorry. When your MS Windows clients are configured as WINS clients
they will use UDP unicast means of registering with the WINS servers. UDP
unicast IS routable. There is thus no need to do as you suggest above.

- John T.

>
> Matt Schillinger
> mschilli at vss.fsi.com
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, 2003-02-25 at 14:20, Ben Hall wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I am in the process of trying to get a large network (300+ systems) spanning
> > 3 subnets to be able to display all windows machines in the Network
> > Neighborhood.  After reading through copious amounts of documentation, using
> > Samba as a domain controller and then having systems on each subnet seemed
> > to be the best approach.
> >
> > I set one of the machines to be the domain controller for what was my
> > workgroup, and while all of my systems are visible to everyone on the
> > network, the browse lists for the rest of the network are still limited to
> > whatever subnet the client machine is on.
> >
> > At this point it looks as though I would have to set up a domain controller
> > for each of the 20+ workgroups.  Of course this is infeasible.  Am I missing
> > something?
> >
> > A few machines are set up to use and proxy WINS, one of my systems is acting
> > as the WINS server, this has had no noticeable effect on the network.
> >
> > Just to make things interesting, my network consists of just about every
> > version of Windows since 95, MacOS from version 7 to 10.2, Sun Solaris 8 and
> > the odd Linux machine.
> >
> >
> > Any help would be very much appreciated.
> >
> > Cheers,
> >
> > Ben
> >
> > --
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-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org