lmhosts questions (answered?)

[Stephen L Arnold]

First, thanks for all the replies to my plaintive cries for help; 
some of this gets a little frustrating when you're trying to do it 
from the seat of one's pants (as it were).  Also, a big thanks to 
the samba team members (one of these days, I'll have to look into 
that pizza voucher thing...).

I looked through all the docs, mail archives, etc, and the only 
references to the lmhosts file I found were with respect to the 
*client* lmhosts file.  Call me an idiot (not uncommon :-), but it 
didn't occur to me that I needed an lmhosts file on the *server* 
side; I thought it would do all name lookups via /etc/hosts 
(without enabling WINS).  I think this is definitely a topic for 
this section of the server-FAQ:

2.3 Name Resolution and Browsing

See also ../BROWSING.txt

1.6) Name resolution issues 1.6.1) LMHOSTS file and when to use it
                                   ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

whenever it's finished.  These sections are currently blank.

I just checked the new samba web pages (maybe I should have checked 
sooner ;-) but I can't even find the server-FAQ anymore.  What 
happened?  The new FAQ seems to come automatically from the bug 
tracking system; what about answers to other questions?  I notice 
there is now a man page for lmhosts, but 1.9.18 didn't come with an 
lmhosts file (I had to make it myself).  And the new man page still 
doesn't say you need one...

Suggestion:  if the old FAQ files distributed with samba are now 
replaced by the bug-track questions/answers, how about a samba HOW-
TO or samba checklist for new users?  There were a couple of other 
things (besides the lmhosts thing) that seemed to be missing from 
the docs that would have been nice to have somewhere (some of us 
aren't unix or network gurus, but we're still interested in running 
samba, and we're not trying to give the rest of you headaches, 
really).

Back to the point, when I finally figured out that maybe I needed 
lmhosts on the samba side, our intermittent network and browsing 
problems seem to be gone (at least for the last few days).

When the world was young, Panyarak Aaron Ngamsritragul carved some 
runes like this:

> I have  gone through the documentation and it says that
> not much is known about lmhosts because MS refused to
> document it !
> 
> Anyway, if you know of any good pointers I can go and find
> the answer, please let know.  Thank you.
> 
> Here are my questions
> 	1. Does anyone have a good sample of the lmhosts file ?
> 	   If yes, could you please post one in the list ?
> 	2. I have set my samba server to act as a wins server too.
> 	   Does this require that lmhosts file be present ?
> 

1) There is a sample in every windoze directory call lmhosts.sam 
(but I'm not sure if samba supports the M$ extensions described in 
the file).  I took my /etc/hosts file and copied it to lmhosts 
(making sure that the names were valid NetBIOS names).

2) Based on my recent experience, I'd say yes (I tried enabling 
WINS support last week, before I had an lmhosts file, and it didn't 
work at all).

Hope this helps, Steve