smbclient server name resolution [SAMBA digest 1503]

[Roeland M.J. Meyer]

At 10:15 26-11-97 +1100, Darrin M. Gorski wrote:
>On Tue, 25 Nov 1997, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:

>> gladly give them a named.boot file and let'em run named. Notice the
>> emphasis on getting Samba to run first, it's an IQ test <grin>. By doing it
>> themselves, it saves me about 3 hours per Samba installation. OTOH, it
>> takes about 10 minutes to fire up named for them.
>
>Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying don't tell them how, just don't do it
>for them. I despise software installs that install other *unrequired*
>software along the way. It's been a long running pet peave of mine. It's
>something Microsoft loves to do.

he,heh... I just spent a few hours figuring how to remove MS-Outlook from a
WinNT workstation so that the users Eudora would work again, after an
Office97 install.

>> Personally, I don't even like them running Samba, at that point and
>> would rather be handing them a WinNTws machine and shift the problems to
>> the Windows/LAN support group <grin>.
>
>You devil. ;-) In my case, that simply moves the problem from me to me.
>And I would *NEVER* encourage a UNIX user to go to NT. I don't want to be
>remembered that way.

I've been called worse, even BOFH and BMFH <grin>. BTW, in our shop, we run
WinNT, with Hummingbird Exceed, for all our workstations. Linux is strictly
for servers here. That way we have the best of both worlds. Although, we
are looking into StarOffice.

>them, and I get a call. Please understand, when *ANYTHING* goes wrong
>with a machine connected to a network (any network), my users say 'The
>network is down', even when their cubie is still working.

Bummer! But then, I wouldn't be providing Samba support for such a luser. I
expect more than that from Unix users. Windows geeks, er users .... that's
what you get, and you expect it, but not from programmers on Unix
workstations.

>> one directory, ftp two files and jigger the SysV init stuff. Generally,
>> you don't even have to crack open vi.  Personally, I set named.boot to
>> "root.wheel r-r-r". 
>
>To reiterate, I simply feel that named should not be installed with 'make
>install' from the Samba distribution. Perhaps a 'make installnamed' would
>be more appropriate. I just don't like the automatic install idea.

We might be in violent agreement here. I wasn't saying that it be under
'make install', simply in the makefile. I thought, that it get its own
entry was understood. I would never advocate makeing it part of the general
install. It should be a separate step.

>Other issues:
>
>  Which named? Will samba come with the source to one? Who'll maintain it?

No need to worry about this one either. Simply do a 'whereis' in the script
and if named isn't found there then don't install named.boot until it's
found. This means that the user has to obtain named before running 'make
inst_named'. If it's a server then chances are real good that named already
exists. Also, only the named.boot file should be generated. 

If it's a networked machine then all the info for generating the named.boot
file already exists, with the only exceptions being the location of the
primary DNS machine and the IPREVERSED entries. Also, you'd want user input
as to which secondary DNS is working as a forwarder.

Samba shouldn't provide sources for named, that's Paul Vixie's job, and he
does it quite well too. We should however, provide references, in the
DNS.txt file, as to where named can be obtained.

If this isn't done by January then I'll look into doing it. I'm into things
a little deep at the moment. Actually, the hot mud's right about
nostril-level.<grin> 

___________________________________________________
Roeland M.J. Meyer, ISOC (InterNIC RM993)
e-mail:		mailto:rmeyer at mhsc.com
Personalweb pages:	http://www.mhsc.com/~rmeyer
Company web-site:	http://www.mhsc.com/
___________________________________________
"The FBI doesn't want to read encrypted documents,
   they want to read YOUR encrypted documents."