WINS capabilities

[Scott H. Baxter]

I have set up SAMBA on AIX 4.2 and can attach to NT shares and vice versa.  I 
acquired and configured SAMBA for basically one reason, that being to gain 
WINS client capabilities for AIX.  Right now it's not working as expected, 
though.

I am implementing Tivoli, and Tivoli requires a bidirectional name to address 
resolution in order to register the managed node agent with the Framework.  I 
can easily gain that resolution on the managed node with a hosts file that 
includes my Tivoli servers.  From the server to the desktop is another 
matter.  I've got 17+K desktops and the host naming convention is not 
supported by our DNS.  Our telecomm engineer and DNS keeper said that our only 
hope was name to address resolution by WINS.  

Sounds good, but I noted in the diagnostics procedures that I had to enable 
the usual gethostbyname() name to address resolution before moving on to 
NetBIOS name resolution.  I need to supplant gethostbyname() with WINS.  The 
specifics of doing that within Tivoli are beyond the scope of this list and 
I'm not asking for that type of advice.  What I do need though, is some 
technique/whatever whereby I can defeat normal name to address resolution on 
the Tivoli server and still derive the IP address of a workstation based on 
its NetBIOS host name using WINS alone.

I verified that the workstation in question is contained in WINS, its address 
is correct, and that smb.conf is properly configured to support WINS client 
functionality, pointing to the right address.  I can execute smbclient with 
the appropriate switch to reference the IP host name along with the NetBIOS 
name and grab the NT share from AIX.

So, advice as to how WINS may function as a primary name to address resolution 
mechanism would be helpful.  Again, I'm not asking how to integrate it with 
Tivoli, I'm only asking if a SAMBA WINS client can even do it.  I'll worry 
about the rest once I get past this hurdle.