%L, subnets and dns resolution Xmas problem

[Robert Dahlem]

Laurent,

On Fri, 25 Dec 1998 01:55:48 +1100, laurent.menu at temic.fr wrote:

>Using the %L macro in smb.conf is for me *very* usefull, I can setup as
>many logical servers as I need and that's great : no need for new machines,
>I can switch logical servers back and forth, it's a kind of System
>Administrator dream :-)

>*But* I've discovered a problem with the %L macro in a subnetted
>environment :

>- it works from win95 and NT4-SP3 as far as the names are resolved by
>broadcast, the pc and the server are on the same subnet

>- but if the client is in another subnet and the name (ie : tet59) is then
>resolved by DNS, wether you chose \\tet59\public, \\tet58\public,
>\\tet30\public, \\td446\public, \\am740b\public, \\mc752b\public or
>\\hermes\public, it connects to \\hermes\public.

This seems to be a behaviour of the client: It looks like it tries to resolve the 
name and then does a reverse lookup at the DNS with the IP address it found. What 
it gets is the first name for that IP adress the DNS server knows about.

You should be able to come around this by trying the following:

	Forbid your client to do DNS lookups.
	Edit a LMHOSTS file with only one of the aliases in it.
	Allow the client to use this LMHOSTS file
	Reboot

If that works for you you may try to add the other aliases to LMHOSTS. It is 
possible that the behaviour returns then (in case the client can do something like 
a reverse lookup in LMHOSTS).

>Please note I can't (and don't want to ;-) use WINS nor configure a lmhosts
>table on the pc's

Just for testing. :-)

>Another (less important :-) question : is there a maximum number of netbios
>aliases for a samba server ?

>From what one can see in the sources its determined by the amount of available 
memory (its just doing a malloc() for each name it finds) and by the max number a 
signed integer can represent on your system (my_netbios_names is an array looped 
over with an int).

Hasta la vista,
               Robert

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