[jcifs] WINS failover?

[Michael B Allen]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 5:50 PM, Abraham Lin
<abraham.lin at post.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've run into some trouble while trying to configure jCIFS to fail over on a
> WINS error. The configuration I'm using looks something like this:
>
>   Config.setProperty( "jcifs.smb.client.domain", "DOMAIN" );
>   Config.setProperty( "jcifs.netbios.wins",
> "123.123.123.123,234.234.234.234" );
>   Config.setProperty( "jcifs.netbios.retryTimeout", "5000" );
>
> The first WINS server isn't behaving correctly and is sending back a
> response type of 0x0A with error code 0x03. However, the second server does
> work properly and responds appropriately to a Name Query.

Hi Abraham,

JCIFS will not failover to the next WINS server if it gets an answer
from the current one. And a negative answer is an answer. JCIFS will
only failover to the next WINS server if the client cannot get an
answer from the current one (such as because of a network failure or
the server isn't responding).

Note that WINS is pretty much not used that much anymore. I don't know
if it's officially deprecated but the point is that it cannot be
relied on. Usually clients resolve short names (like NetBIOS) by using
a DNS search suffix.

The only reason JCIFS uses NetBIOS is because that part of the code
was written 10 years ago (although Windows can still do NetBIOS and so
JCIFS should too - JCIFS is as Windows does).

Mike

-- 
Michael B Allen
Java Active Directory Integration
http://www.ioplex.com/