Multi-WINS behavior.

Peter Samuelson peter at cadcamlab.org
Sat Jul 15 06:41:20 GMT 2000


[Chris Hertel <crh at nts.umn.edu>]
> If you magically guess that there are toolks hidden in a partition of
> the CD that might be documented but since you can't get to the
> on-line documentation because you don't have a system it doesn't
> matter then you can guess which SASH image is correct for you and try
> to find a copy of fx that will let you partition the drive.
> 
> That is, it only took a few hours to find the right files on the CD
> and get them to work.

I am severely impressed.  Having multiple SGI's around here, I didn't
have to go through that, but if I had had to, I don't know if I would
have figured it out or not.


> > There is only the One True Namespace, and if you want to advertize
> > to multiple WINS servers, you are explicitly consenting to the
> > problems caused by the possibility that there might in fact be
> > multiple namespaces.
> 
> Even this isn't quite true.  Consider a subnet with both B and H
> nodes, and a WINS server somewhere else.  The B nodes are in a subset
> of the namespace seen by the H nodes.  If a B node tries to claim a
> name that belongs to a node in another subnet, the registration will
> succeed.

Yes, I know, different machines might see different parts of the
namespace, but at the heart of it all there is still only the One True,
Flat Namespace.

Maybe in another five years everyone will have migrated to Win2k with
DNS and we can all forget about this.  (Hmmm, does Win2k use DNS or AD
for browsing, or does it still need NetBIOS names for that?)

> What I really don't understand is this: If you *want* multiple name
> spaces and you're *going* to do the work of preventing collisions
> anyway, why not just sync the WINS servers.  Yes, yes, I understand
> that Samba doesn't do this yet.

Well, that's why, then. (:

> I really, really did ask if anyone wanted this a while back and
> really really didn't get much of a 'hurrah' from the crowd.

It would be cool to have around, but Samba is reliable enough that most 
of us don't see a pressing need for failover....

> > > All of the Windows systems with which I've worked assume
> > > failover.  Note that I haven't worked with W/98.
> > 
> > Right, Microsoft accepts this cold, hard reality. (:
> 
> Don't follow...

The cold, hard reality that on a given network there is only One True
Namespace, and any attempt to play with multiple disjoint namespaces
that can talk to each other is at best a crude hack.

> > Me neither, I hate browsing.  It confuses me like you wouldn't
> > believe. 
> 
> Grin.  Well, we've got something else in common then.

Yeah, but you probably at least have a basic understanding of it.  I
sometimes like to think I do, but every time I run into a browsing
problem I'm left scratching my head and muttering "Windows bugs,
Windows bug," even though it probably isn't one.

Peter


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