[Fwd: Multiple Wins Servers]

[Christopher R. Hertel]

The HEAD development branch includes partial support for WINS failover.  
That is, you can enter a semicolon-delimited list of WINS servers.  Once 
this bit of code is complete, if the first WINS server goes down Samba 
will switch to using the second, etc.

The problem is that there is code in Samba that stores the WINS server
address and uses that to identify packets coming from WINS.  This is an
important bit of code, and I didn't write it.  I have asked for guidance
from the author of that code to ensure that I don't mess things up.

NMBD is designed such that has a single process listening for packets, and
this code is responsible for assuring that the incomming packets are
correctly assigned to their respective awaiting transactions.  I don't
want to mess that up. The author of that piece has promised to help me
out, but has been quite busy with much more important fixes and
improvements. 

Regarding the ability to query multiple WINS servers (as opposed to simple
failover):  There was much debate about this when the failover code was
proposed (I no longer remember who first proposed it, but they provided
code which was quite nice).  My own further research suggests that this is
a *really bad idea*.  RFC1001/1002 specifically warns against allowing a
host to see disjoint name spaces, as this will result in name conflicts. 

Chris -)-----

-- Start of included mail From:  Danny Travis <danny_travis at email.mobil.com>

> X-Mozilla-Status2:  00000000
> Date:  Wed, 03 Jan 2001 11:02:39 -0600
> X-Accept-Language:  en
> To:  samba at lists.samba.org
> Subject:  Multiple Wins Servers

> Can Samba be configured to point to multiple wins servers? It looks like
> the wins server option only allows for one IP address.
> 
-- End of included mail.


-- 
Christopher R. Hertel -)-----                   University of Minnesota
crh at nts.umn.edu              Networking and Telecommunications Services

    Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them
    with your hands...you choose them as your guides, and following
    them you will reach your destiny.  --Carl Schultz