WINS - NetBIOS question

[Kevin Rowland]

I am calling on the WINS/NetBIOS expertise out there to answer a
question for me.

I have 5 samba servers set up around the network acting as translators
for the WinNT/9x machines to access our institutional file space hosted
in AFS (the translators are all Sun Sparc stations). If I want to give
the Wintel machines a drive mapping, I currently have to decide which
translator best suits them and make a persistent mapping using one of
the five machines (e.g. "net use \\transX\user" where X is 1 thru 5).
Currently am running a single WINS server on NT for NetBIOS name
resolution.

I would like to be able to have all the clients specify a single name
(e.g. "\\trans\user") and let the *WINS* server decide which of the 5 is
best suited (based on proximity, load, etc...). I am pretty sure that my
NT WINS server will not allow for this kind of "load balancing"
technique. So is this scenario possible? Does Samba WINS allow me to do
this? or Has anyone modified their nmbd code to try and implement this
type of "round-robin" WINS service?

I look forward to any advice/thoughts on this subject... I appologize if
this has been covered in earlier posts, though I looked and could not
find any (certainly not anything recent).

-- kevin

Kevin Rowland
Lead Developer/Analyst
Arts & Letters Computing Office
University of Notre Dame

krowland at nd.edu