[Samba] Inclusion of libnss_wins in vendor distros?

[Vijay Avarachen]

Jonathan,
    Which distributions are you talking about?  Also are you referring to
the use of wins for hostname resolution in nsswitch.conf file?  I was under
then impression that only worked for SGI Irix?  Am I mistaken? I am running
RHEL/CentOS 4.x and Gentoo, but come with the wins library.  In the case of
Gentoo you have to use the right USE flags of course.

Vijay Avarachen
:wq!

On 12/23/05, Jonathan Johnson <jon at sutinen.com> wrote:
>
> This might be a stupid question, but I ask only because I can't think of
> a good reason...
>
> Why do so many vendors' builds of Samba not include libnss_wins, the
> WINS/NetBIOS name resolution library? I find that it is very helpful for
> my Linux/Samba servers to be able to resolve hostnames by WINS. It also
> seems to improve domain browsing performance dramatically to have the
> library present and enabled in nsswitch.conf. It seems to me to be such
> a basic and essential part of the SMB protocol, yet many distributions
> omit it. It's very annoying. I guess the solution is to always build
> Samba using the latest stable sources from samba.org.
>
> Perhaps someone thinks it's a security vulnerability and therefore
> shouldn't be included by default, but would a system be any less secure
> if the library was included but not disabled by default? Besides, in my
> experience, even when the WINS libraries are included, nsswitch.conf
> must be edited to enable it -- I don't see the mere presence of
> libnss_wins.so on a system making it any less vulnerable, just as having
> a key on the inside of a locked door doesn't make the house any less
> secure.
>
> Any good reasons why it wouldn't be included?
>
> --
> --Jon Johnson
> Sutinen Consulting, Inc.
> www.sutinen.com
>
>
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