WINS resolution and other problems

[Nathan Neulinger]

Does anyone have a reasonable set of steps for what is necessary to gets 
WINS resolution working properly?

I have had hardly any luck in getting this stuff to work. 

Heres the situation: network with 20-30 subnets, no control over who is 
running a nmbd or wins server. Primary resource we're interested in 
making available is a central samba server.

We have the routers doing a helpered-broadcast for nmbd, so any broadcast 
packets for WINS services should get directed to our central nmbd server. 

The problem is that this server does not appear to work properly all that 
time. Sometimes it looks like it gets a request, is able to look it up 
and find it, and then doesn't send anything out. Other times it doesn't 
appear to be able to find the name at all. 

The config we are using for the nmbd server:

	[global]
	   lock directory = /home/local/samba/locks
	   log file = /home/local/samba/log
	   share modes = yes
	   workgroup = CC
	   security = user
	   local master = yes
	   wins support = yes
	   wins proxy = yes
	   status = yes

The config we are using for our regular central samba servers:

	[global]
	   load printers = yes
	   lock directory = /home/local/samba/locks
	   log file = /home/local/samba/log
	   share modes = yes
	   workgroup = UMR
	
	[homes]
	   comment = Home Directories
	   browseable = no
	   read only = no
	   writable = yes
	   create mode = 0750
	   guest ok = no
	   admin users = root
	   browseable = yes
	
	[tmp]
	   comment = Temporary file space
	   path = /tmp
	   read only = no
	   public = yes

Basically the setup we want to have is:

Multiple samba servers on campus, co-existing with windows nt, 95, novell,
etc., with a single samba based WINS server that can answer requests for
everything. Also, would like to do browsing over the whole network as well.

We do not want to code the WINS server address at the client. If we have 
to, we can, but we would much prefer to have it remain a broadcast. We 
are using DHCP for address assignment though, so could probably send back 
an address that way.

-----------

Ideally, we'd much rather just turn off WINS at the client side 
entirely and use DNS. But the problem is, the WIN95 clients don't seem to 
pay attention to this setting, or send out an invalid DNS request. Any ideas?

-----------

On another side note, is there any was to get nmbd to not cache the 
results of a DNS lookup? We are wanting to use DNS rotation at some point 
for presenting multiple servers as "samba.umr.edu", but at the moment, 
nmbd will look up the address once, and then never looks it up again, 
rendering the DNS rotation innefective.

-- Nathan

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Nathan Neulinger                  Univ. of Missouri - Rolla
EMail: nneul at umr.edu                    Computer Center
WWW: http://www.umr.edu/~nneul      SysAdmin: rollanet.org