LMHOSTS as static WINS entry repository?

[Christopher R. Hertel]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 10:45:21AM -0500, Gerald (Jerry) Carter wrote:
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> On Mon, 28 Apr 2003, Herb Lewis wrote:
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> > Maybe we could add some of the directive support from the MS lmhosts
> > file to ours. Only load entries flagged #PRE or #DOM into WINS
> 
> I would rather see a "wins preload file = <string>" in smb,conf that 
> points to an lmhosts formatted file to be used as static entries in 
> wins.tdb.  Keeping lmhosts and the static entries is better and less 
> confusing I think.

I've been wildly busy, and have not participated in this conversation.  
My book is moving into production, I'm digging out from the time away from
home and office, and my in-laws are visiting.  Seems you just put down one
elephant and you get handed two more.

Anywhich...

First question I have is this:
Should our LMHosts do exactly the same job as Microsoft's LMHosts or
should we allow it to be different?  We're currently different, but that 
causes trouble for some users.

>From my reading it seems that the MS LMHosts is a kitchen-junk-drawer.  
It can be used in a variety of ways.  For example, you can use it to
identify DMBs (both the same workgroup and foreign workgroups) for browse
list syncing.  We *do not* have the same feature, to my knowledge.  We
have similar features--eg., we can announce to foreign DMBs and Enhanced
Browsing to discover foreign DMBs--but nothing to specifically/statically
identify foreign DMBs so that we can query them.  (Please correct me if'n
I'm wrong.)

I am not sure, however, whether the MS LMHosts file is used to pre-load 
WINS.  Some documentation I've seen suggests that this is optional (and 
must be enabled via a configuration check-box).  In general, the 
documentation suggests that the LMHosts file was designed for client-side 
use.

All that in mind, I like Jerry's suggestion.  The end user can point the
"wins preload file" to the Samba LMHosts file, just to simplify things.

Chris -)-----

-- 
"Implementing CIFS - the Common Internet FileSystem" ISBN: 013047116X
Samba Team -- http://www.samba.org/     -)-----   Christopher R. Hertel
jCIFS Team -- http://jcifs.samba.org/   -)-----   ubiqx development, uninq.
ubiqx Team -- http://www.ubiqx.org/     -)-----   crh at ubiqx.mn.org
OnLineBook -- http://ubiqx.org/cifs/    -)-----   crh at ubiqx.org