[linux-cifs-client] CIFS mount works when I specify IP address, butnotwhenI only specify hostname

[Steven French]

> Does "nslookup hostname" (or dig) and "ping hostname" NEED to work? 
> Shouldn't CIFS use NMB or whatever Samba uses to resolve hostnames? 
> Samba, smbclient, and smbfs all work on this same computer.

Support for a secondary mechanism (e.g. WINS/NBNS and/or LMHOSTS file 
and/or the local RFC1001 B-Node broadcast) for determining the server's ip 
address could be made optional in the cifs client but it is a lower 
priority for me than some of the mustfix issues that I have been 
debugging.   I would be willing to take patches though (and it may be 
doable in only a few hundred lines of code).   Since RFC1001/RFC1002 time 
period, many of the reasons for having two name services (DNS vs. 
NBNS/WINS) have disappeared, and for good or bad DNS has won as the 
standard mechanism for name to ip address mapping.  I do think there is a 
reasonable case for local subnet B-node broadcast (RFC1001 style) being 
helpful in small LANs with no DNS - and this would be easy enough to add 
to the kernel as would adding an optional check in a local (Samba) LMHOSTS 
file in the mount helper if the getHostByName fails).   Waiting for the 
B-node broadcast name query to timeout could add measurably to the user's 
wait time on a failed mount attempt (server down or mistyped server name), 
but the check in LMHOSTS would be harmless.




Steve French
Senior Software Engineer
Linux Technology Center - IBM Austin
phone: 512-838-2294
email: sfrench at-sign us dot ibm dot com
-------------- next part --------------
HTML attachment scrubbed and removed