smbclient server name resolution

[Roeland M.J. Meyer]

At 02:37 25-11-97 +1100, Darrin M. Gorski wrote:
>On Mon, 24 Nov 1997, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
>
>> You know, this keeps coming up. Why are folks so scared of running
>> secondary DNS servers? It is *exactly* for the reasons outlined herein that
>> you'd want to have a secondary DNS, at least one, within every sub-net
>> which is isolated by low-speed/high-cost connections. Even when the
>> subnet-subnet connection is via LAN, each subnet should have a server
>> running a secondary DNS, at the minimum.
>
>I disagree. We have 30+ subnets in our building alone. It would be a
>hassle to run a DNS on all of them.

In which case you would only need a few DNS servers <grin>. The only hassle
would be the initial organization. After that, things would be automated.
The performance issues remain the same, however. Local lookups are *much*
faster than remote lookups. I have secondaries, on machines which I haven't
looked at in years,  yet I change out machines and IP assignments, on those
sub-nets, on a regular basis. If I used HOSTS or LMHOSTS, I'd have to
propogate the new assignments through-out the LAN *EVERY* time I did this.
DNS does this for me in an automated fasshion, with NO mistakes. This is
why DNS was invented, after all.

>People seem to forget that the resolver can be configured to use a static
>database (/etc/hosts) before querying a name server. Perhaps your highly
>used hosts should be in an /etc/hosts file? Or in Samba's LMHOSTS file...

Talk about a hassle. What if one of those hosts changed names, or you had
to re-number that workgroup, add a new host, or remove one? HOST files
would have to change everywhere, unless everyone was using NIS, as well. In
which case, you're still better off with DNS than HOSTS. I only use HOSTS
for critical HOSTS at boot-time, like main DNS and NIS servers <grin>. BTW,
Windows and MAC machines can only be relied on to use DNS, and not NIS, so
LMHOSTS and HOSTS files would have to be distributed manually to them, in
your scenario. This is way too much error-prone work, in my estimation.

DNS is way under-utilized, as an automated site-management tool, especially
at the large shops, who could benefit the most.

There is no conceivable reason to not run DNS on a Unix host. Lottsa
benefit and minimal down-side risk.

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