machine name lookups

[Daryl L. Biberdorf]

We have been looking for a way to notify our users when they
are running low on disk quota, without sending them mail.
WinPopup actually seemed like the best way, so my partner
began looking at feeding quota output into smbclient -M
when quota was getting tight.

The only problem is that smbclient -M frequently fails to find
the client's host name. The -I parameter will often fix it, but
I am concerned about the -M problem nonetheless. I have a machine
configured to be a WINS server, and all of the lab machines
are DHCP-configured to use that server. What exactly is
the -M parameter looking for? What would I do to address the
problem?

I asked a question a week or so ago along the same lines (with
no response :( ), regarding why Samba appears to do a reverse
DNS lookup on clients (using gethostbyaddr() in util.c if I
remember right). Why does it need to do this? Our DNS servers
(maintained by another group) were cut off due to a WAN outage
a week or so ago. At that point, EVERYTHING Samba-related
stopped working due to this lookup. Yuck!  (I have since
installed a local caching DNS server. Will this prevent
it from happening in the future? I'd still like to know that
a DNS failure won't stop my lab from working.)

The reason I ask is that all of our lab machines are dynamically
given IP addresses, with a lease period of 2 hours. None of these
machines is in the DNS system, simply because Lab10 could have
different IPs throughout the day. Is there any way to deal with
the lookup problems I mentioned above?

Thanks in advance.

Daryl
Daryl Biberdorf		darylb at superserve.com