DHCP discovery of WINS servers
Christopher R. Hertel
crh at nts.umn.edu
Tue Sep 4 09:58:05 GMT 2001
> 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().
Andrew, have you had a chance to look at handle_wins_server_list() to see
if we can change it from a string to a list format?
> > - 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.
If so, then how does smbclient discover its WINS server? Same for
nmblookup? These tools need to have a WINS server and (I think) they
currently get their WINS server by reading smb.conf.
> > - 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.
Yes, but if we don't get an answer then we don't have a WINS server. That
puts us in "B" mode.
I suppose we could use the list delimiters in loadparms to do something
like this:
wins server = dhcp | 192.168.10.34 : 10.73.199.18
The idea is "try DHCP first, but if that fails use this list of IPs".
(I'm not sure about the '|' delimiter but you get the idea.) That further
suggests something like this:
wins server = dhcp : 192.168.10.34 : 10.73.199.18
which (noting the delimiter change) would retrieve the WINS list from
dhcp and add the additional IPs to the end of the list. List order is
significant in WINS Failover.
> Does it make sense to add this minimal bit of functionality and expand it
> if people find it useful?
It sounds good to me. This feature is available in DHCP so why not use it?
Chris -)------
--
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
More information about the samba-technical
mailing list