[Samba] Network browsing

[Steven Whaley]

I think you're correct that your problem is DNS related.  From the sound
of it you don't really have a DNS server running.  Your clients have
external DNS via the cable providers DNS servers, but that's no help for
resolving internal network names.   So every time you try to browse to a
client ARP has to run to get an IP for the network name.  If you set up
your PDC, or another machine, to do DNS things will go much quicker, as
you've seen when you set up the host files. 

James Perry wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I've been able to successfully set up a small network, using Samba as
> a PDC. I'm currently using the latest updated version of Fedora 7, and
> the latest version of Samba. I'm really new to DNS and WINS, so please
> excuse my ignorance if I've completely overlooked something. Perhaps
> you could point me in the right direction...
>
> My Samba server is set up as a domain controller, master browser, and
> I have it set to act as a WINS server. Everything on the client side
> seems to work wonderfully, except browsing. It is incredibly slow.
> I've set the client TCP/IP->Advanced->WINS settings to point to
> directly to the Samba server. All of the client machines pick up a IP
> and DNS server through a DSL cable modem, and not through the server
> (right now, I hope to change this as I go). The client is also set to
> use NetBIOS over TCP/IP. Now, if I manually enter a setting in the
> client hosts file, browsing is almost instantaneous. Without an entry
> in the hosts file, though, browsing slows to a crawl. I've certainly
> got a DNS issue going on here. To work around this, I had to put a
> entry in the hosts file on every single client in the network. I'm
> suspecting that I shouldn't have to do this, and DNS will handle IP
> address resolution for the server. All of our client machines are
> win2k at the moment.
>
> My question is, is setting the server to act as a WINS server (with
> clients WINS server pointing to the server) enough, or do I need to
> enable DNS on top of that, and point clients to the server for DNS?
> Or, more generally, how have you folks set up your server/client
> networks to use your server as a WINS server... and have any of you
> experienced very slow network browsing and how have you resolved it?
>
> Thank you all,
> JP

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