%L, subnets and dns resolution Xmas problem

[Florian G. Pflug]

Hi

> Your problem is not with Samba.  Here's the issue:  Suppose, on an NT
> machine, you type something like:
> 
> start \\10.0.0.3
> 
> NT does something along the lines of:
> 
> 1.  Query the service list of the IP given.
> 2.  Grep for the relevant hex name that identifies the Netbios Name
> 3.  Connect to the IP using the Netbios Name.
> 
> This happens, by the way, to be a very good system, and is something I'd
> like to see smbclient support, although smbclient should do it right and
> have alias support.
> 
> Now, 95/98 act very similarly, but can not be fed an IP directly.  However,
> they CAN be configured to lookup NetBIOS names via DNS, at which point they
> act as above.  Note, this means they lost the original identity of the
> "requested servicename"--Windows SMB has no concept of aliases.  (Note--I
> know nothing of the datastream--it's *very* conceivable that the requested
> servicename lies somewhere, and thus can be extracted by Samba.  Why don't
> you do a little LAN sniffing and report the results?)
My expirience is that if dns and netbios name are NOT the same on
win95/98/nt, you have to specify the netbios name as computername, and give
the dns-name or ip-address with -I <ip-address> when connecting via
smbclient.
This looks like the netbios name the pc wants to connect to is given
somewhere in the smb-datastream. 

> The solution given--using virtual addresses--seems rather nightmarish to
> implement.  You'd have to hand-hack the way nmbd and smbd start up to
> display a different Netbios *NAME* for each interface.  I don't know off
> hand how you'd do that.  Now, what MIGHT work would be to remote announce to
> subnets you wanted to be able to see your server.  You may or may not need
> to remove from DNS too.  Note, I've never seen Remote Announce actually
> work, but we have a funky install around these parts :-)
It's not that hard - if you call smbd or nmbd with "-s <config file>" you
can specifly a different config file for each virtual host. 

                                         Greetings, Florian Pflug