browsing mystery....

[Steve Langasek]

Anthony,

On Mon, Nov 26, 2001 at 03:03:17PM -0800, Anthony Brock wrote:
> I don't know if it's actually rare, or if most people rely of Windows OS 
> for WINS when Samba fails. We have been attempting to use Samba with WINS 
> for several years, and have encountered erratic/difficult to diagnose 
> problems the entire time it has been installed. Perhaps 40% of our networks 
> don't have a problem, about 10% of our networks function properly 
> "occasionally", and the remainder have NEVER worked.

> This has been persistent from version 2.0.0 through 2.2.2. Unfortunately, 
> there is almost no assistance available to help with:

> 1) properly diagnosing if a machine is properly registered,

FWIW, up to and including Samba 2.2.1a (the most recent Samba I've had
running as a WINS server), all WINS registrations are stored on-disk in
a file called `wins.dat' in a directory that's configured at compile
time (on my Linux systems, it's /var/state/samba/).  Checking whether a
machine is registered with the WINS server is relatively simple: either
the machine name appears in this file, or it doesn't.

> 2) diagnosing how to determine WHAT information it is registering,

For this, it's important to understand netbios type codes (the last byte
of the 16-byte netbios name).  I don't have a complete list of these,
nor a pointer to such a list -- but I believe these are documented on
the web in some fashion.

Cheers,
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer
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