DHCP discovery of WINS servers

[Scott Gifford]

Shirish Kalele <kalele at veritas.com> writes:

> On 4 Sep 2001, Scott Gifford wrote:
> 
> >Shirish Kalele <kalele at veritas.com> writes:
> >
> >> On Tue, 4 Sep 2001, Christopher R. Hertel wrote:
> >
> >[...]
> >
> >> >This is where Windows integration of NBT into the kernel is an advantage. 
> >> >They can (and probably do, but I haven't checked) include the request for 
> >> >the netbios-name-serevers in the initial DHCP exchange.
> >> >
> >> There might be a way to include such a request even for Unix systems. I
> >> haven't really played with dhcp configuration on Unix.
> >
> >The way that current UNIX DHCP clients handle the very similar case of
> >translating nameservers from DHCP into /etc/resolv.conf is by
> >rewriting /etc/resolv.conf with the information from DHCP.  Maybe
> >something similar would be more in line with how current systems work,
> >and save the trouble of implementing a mini-DHCP client inside Samba.
> >
> this would be ideal. However, and David CB can correct me here, taking the
> case of Solaris, the DHCP client comes bundled, and there is no way to
> make it get the nbns-server-list and write it to a file. In fact, I don't
> think there is a way to specify the sort of info you want from dhcp: it's
> preconfigured. I know the solution really lies in the dhcp client, but
> that code is not in our hands.

There are a number of readily available free DHCP clients, and it
should be straightforward for a Solaris user to replace the native
DHCP client with one of the free ones.

But that may be too drastic a change to make to the system just to
automatically set WINS stuff up.  Maybe a way to get the information
from DHCP without having to code a DHCP client inside Samba would be
to modify one of the existing DHCP clients so it could get the
information and pass it back...

----ScottG.