wins.dat and non-ASCII netbios names

Bjoern JACKE samba at j3e.de
Wed Jan 26 15:54:01 GMT 2005


Hi,

there is a problem with storing netbios names into wins.dat, 
especially when there are names which contain non-ASCII characters. 
The netbios names are decoded from the ASCII representation (as 
described in http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q194203/) into the 
netbios names and saved this way. As we do not know the encoding of 
these netbios names this can be any copdepage and it can contain any 
byte including newlines and quotes, which is quite common in CP* 
encodings. When such a netbios name with newline is registered, the 
winѕ.dat is heavily screwed up. We need to find different way to 
store netbios names. I have a couple of ideas how to do that:

- just store the names in the ASCII encoding which is used on the wire 
(backdraw: adding static wins entries is complicated and hard to 
read)

- store everything in TDBs (again)

- store everything as it is now but store it base64 coded when 
non-ASCII or otherhow broken

To me the last possibility looks very good and it would not need much 
things to be changed. What way to go might also depend on how wins 
replication stuff will be done. Any Ideas what might be the best way 
to go?

Bjoern


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