smbclient server name resolution

[mac at nibsc.ac.uk]

David,

>Hello.  I have been looking at smbclient source code and it seems to use
>gethostbyname first to try to resolve a server name and then tries WINS.

I have long suspected this.

There appears (from my simpleton users view) to be no consistency within
the Samba code on name resolution.  smbclient and nmblookup can give veryt
different answers to the same sorts of questions.

And as for what nmbd does ........


I've mentioned it on this list before and had 'dns proxy = no' suggested to
me as a fix, but I'm still running 1.9.16p11 at the moment.  I also suspect
that this setting will make no difference to smbclient.


I still believe it ought to be possible to have utterly separate and
distinct NetBIOS and DNS namespaces on the same LAN, but I guess the Samba
team doesn't see it that way (and it may well be for very good reasons,
but no-one's explained them to me yet).


Assuming your DHCP server hands out a (local) WINS server address, then (I
feel) you should be able to get your MS-clients to use your local print
server AOK.  Since smbclient uses it's own idiosyncratic way of resolving
server names, you're probably stuck with the dial-up mess.


Come on Samba team.  Build a single universal NetBIOS resolver module and
use it consistenly across the whole Samba product.  Put in the ability for
it to use the DNS as a _backup_ service if neccesary, but make that a
turn-offable option.  Please.






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