SAMBA digest 1822

[Smith Darren B]

Date: Wed, 23 Sep 1998 21:38:54 -0500
> From: "Daryl L. Biberdorf" <darylb at superserve.com>
> To: samba at sam
> Subject: machine name lookups
> Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19980923213854.008144b0 at pop.a001.sprintmail.com>
> 
> 
> 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
> 
>

But hang on......  wont an LMHOSTS file solve your problem?  I had the
same issue (not finding hosts with smbclient using their netbios names)
and as soon as I made an entry in an LMHOSTS file - all was well.  This
way you wouldnt need any name resolution server.

Give it a go and tell me if it works...

Cheers,

Darren Smith
Unix Administrator
CUDiv - Olympic Dam
ext. 87242