Running smb without nmb? (Linux Suse 8.1 feature)

[l. a. walsh]

I recently upgraded my Linux distro to SuSE 8.1 which
came w/samba 2.2.5.

A feature of the upgrade was that it 'split' the startup
script for samba from 1 script for _smb_ & _nmb_ to 2 scripts.

Now the prologue (used by insserv to create the numbered startup
scripts with dynamic numbering based on dependencies in the prologues
of all the startup scripts for a given run level) says that
nmb is a prereq for smb.

That's nice.  

For some reason, though, the upgrade process didn't bother to
chkconfig nmb to 'on'.  So I had no end of headaches having assumed
nmb was running -- since simply running the startup script for 'smb'
would
tell me if there was an error for nmb or smb on startup (now I get
to run two scripts or create a special inclusive script).

Ok -- enough of my whining.  Question is this: is there any good reason
for splitting the two or making so one is runnable w/o the other?
Just because it caused me a few days of grief (not continuous, but 
intermixed with several other tasks) doesn't mean it's not really a
useful feature --- for *some* reason.

I think it is a bug in SuSE's startup scripts that it doesn't check
pre-reqs at run-time, but only during the static script setup, but 
that's just my opinion based on fault-tolerance.

So how/why would splitting these scripts be a good thing? 

Thanks,
linda

p.s. -- as for my question of why an NMB lookup of a domain name would
result in the PDC sending back ICMP-not reachachable packets -- this
appears to have been the culprit.