WINS problem

[Stephen L Arnold]

Greetings Earthlings:

I finally convinced the LAN guy to remove NetBlooie from our 
windoze clients.  I also made the samba box the local and master 
browser (we have no NT boxes at the moment).  Local browsing seems 
to have gotten faster (at least Mr. Robinson's Network Neighborhood 
resolves faster).  However, our LAN is isolated (windoze clients 
dial out to get to the internet, retrieve mail, etc), and when I 
connect my windoze box to our local ISP, browsing our internal 
network gets *really* slow.

I decided to try letting samba be the WINS server for our network 
(right now, all clients have identical hosts and lmhosts files with 
our private IP -> hostname mapping) but it doesn't work :-(  Here's 
what I did:

1) enabled the WINS server option in smb.conf
2) stopped and restarted the smb service
3) enabled WINS with IP address of samba box on my windoze box in 
the TCP/IP -> NIC properties (windoze makes you reboot)
4) reboot windoze, dial out, and then I can't see the network at all
5) look in Network properties and WINS is disabled!

What's weird is, the first time I enable WINS, windoze seems to 
like it.  If I close the TCP/IP -> NIC dialog, then open it again, 
the IP address is still there, but it won't let me close it again!  
It says something about "this IP address is invalid. contact your 
network admin."

What gives? (other than windoze being a brain-damaged piece of crap)

Any help would be appreciated, Steve Arnold


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Stephen L. Arnold                        Senior Systems Engineer
ENSCO Inc.                        email:  arnold.steve at ensco.com
P.O. Box 5488                         www:  http://www.ensco.com
Vandenberg AFB, CA  93437             voice: 805.734.8232 x68838
                                               fax: 805.734.4779
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