nmbd as WINS proxy

[Christian Barth]

> Thanks for the information. In that case, what is mean by the man page
> when it says "In addition, nmbd can act as a WINS proxy, relaying
> broadcast queries from clients that do not understand how to talk the
> WINS protocol to a WIN server"?
The netbios name resolution is very trick, so I'm not sure about what 
this means. Since my samba box is a wins server all name resolution 
problems went away.

But samba, consisting of smbd and nmbd, uses all the WINS-information 
for talking to windows and other samba machines. The netbios 
information is not reported to the operating system. If you want to 
ping/telnet/ftp/ssh to a host by netbios name, the tcp/ip part of 
linux has to use samba to get the IP-Adress from the name. And this 
is normaly *not* done, as samba is a aplication and not a part of the 
operating system. You have to tell the OS to do so, i think this can 
be done by winbind.

If you have 2 linux machines in a net of thousends of NT machines you 
may help you with the comand "nmblookup" whicht is part of the samba 
suite. (I assume the linux boxes are only used by "experts".)  
Configure samba to use your wins server (wins server = 
123.456.789.123 in smb.conf) and use nmblookup to geht the IP 
addresse, then use the IP-aaddress for ping, telnet, .....
It should not bo to hard to wirte a little shell skrip "ping_netbios" 
that takes the name, resolves it with nmblookup and involves ping.

Christian

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In a world without walls and fences, who needs windows and gates? (SUN)