DHCP discovery of WINS servers

[Shirish Kalele]

On Sun, 2 Sep 2001, Andrew Bartlett wrote:

>I've been thinkg about this, and there are a few other issues:  
> - we now have the start of wins fail-over support, so we now cope with
>multiple wins servers (in HEAD, where I would apply such a patch).

Yes, the patch will need to be modified a bit to create a list of wins
servers to pass to handle_wins_server_list().

> - we don't want to be doing a dhcp operation for *every* client
>operation.  While its fine to do it each time the server starts, doing
>it every time a client (like smbclient) starts could be a little
>overkill.

We don't. Only nmbd gets a list of wins servers to use when it starts up
the first time. smbd and smbclient or any other program doesn't do any
dhcp.

> - what if our request is lost?  UDP is lossy, should we at least make
>some attempt to send a second request?

The more attempts we make, the longer nmbd will take to start doing its
job: registering names and workgroups with the network and wins server. At
least, with the way the dhcp stuff is implemented right now.  

Does it make sense to add this minimal bit of functionality and expand it
if people find it useful?

- Shirish