Some help with broadcasts through a Linux system

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, 3 Feb 1999, Dan Kaminsky wrote:

> >i would discourage anyone from doing this.  use a WINS server instad.
> 
> Uhm, sorry, we don't always have power to control everybody else on the
> network.  Sometimes it's a power thing, or a legacy thing, or whatnot, but
> sometimes we can't force everybody else to use us for WINS services.

then you fall into  the category where "remote announce" is appropriate
for you.  remember that everyone on the remote subnet will *still* have to
resolve the netbios name of the samba server somehow, and that *still*
means either a static entry in ther remote WINS server or DNS or an entry
in each and every remote client's lmhosts file.

> Furthermore, using WINS is saying that your server will never go down.  A
> number of shops can't use WINS because for most of its history it was only
> available on NT, and believe you me, NT goes down.  Even Samba WINS doesn't
> yet have fault tolerance.
> 
> There are environments where netbios broadcasts, though somewhat noisy,
> simply *work*.  Diff'rent Strokes, Diff'rent Folks.  This isn't like, say,
> putting up a root user TFTP server :-)

that's why "mixed" and "hybrid" exists, which is a combination of
broadcast and point-to-point NetBIOS resolution.