Samba Directory Services, was Re: take on future events

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Tue, 2 Feb 1999, Dan Kaminsky wrote:

> 
> >> WINS *is* single point of failure, remember?  :-)  WINS server goes down,
> >
> >WINS is independent of DFS.
> 
> Not as I'm referring them to.

definitely is.

>  WINS is a way of tracking what machines are
> out there.

that's one way of looking at it.  however a better way to look at it is to
think of it as a dynamic form of dns.  not only that but it can resolve
where to go for specific services (netbios type, 16th char) as well as
hosts (1st 15 chars).

>  In UNC Namespace, workgroups do *not* exist,

UNC namespace, you mean "start | run | \\server-name" for example?  if so,
that's because this is looking up SERVER-NAME<20> - an SMB file service.
no servers ever, ever register WORKGROUP-NAME<20> to offer SMB file
services on a per-workgroup basis: they can't!

in other words, i am unsure as to why you are saying this / pursuing this
line of reasoning and i think it stems from a misunderstanding, but hey:
what the heck, i could be wrong :)

> In DFS-Space, this is unnecessary.  The admin can set anything to any name,
> and it'll work since DFS allows pure IP's to be given as system names.  DFS
> really has alot of potential for evil :-)

hm, cool.  well, it will "work" but if the redirected location does not
exist then it won't "work".  that includes attempts to connect to
WORKGROUP-NAME<20> which will always fail (oh, except on a samba server!)
 
> >my "evil plans" i mentioned earlier were to
> >put a "round-robin" or similar response into samba WINS service in order
> >to provide multiple indentical smbd servers under the same NetBIOS name,
> >all of which should provide DFS-root points (and no other file-shares).
> 
> Unsure what you mean by this.

have several machines under the same netbios name, transparently.  this is
one thing that is severely lacking in ms's implementation of dfs: the dfs
root mount point can only be on one m/c.  identical machines under one
netbios name is one up on microsoft.

need dfs first to make it useful.

luke