Samba Newbie Questions

Crist J. Clark cjc at cc942873-a.ewndsr1.nj.home.com
Thu May 6 04:06:58 GMT 1999


Sorry if these are RTFM questions, but I have yet to find the
answers... and one problem is the FM. ;)

I have installed Samba on a FreeBSD 2.2.8 machine. I want it to mainly
control a few printers for our NT domain, and if that goes well, the
ability to access user directories 'directly' with Win9x and NT is
enticing since the box's main purpose now is a mail server.

Question 1:
I have smbd and nmbd running out of inted. My inetd.conf lines of
relevence are,

swat    stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/local/sbin/swat    swat
netbios-ssn     stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/local/sbin/smbd smbd
netbios-ns      dgram   udp     wait    root    /usr/local/sbin/nmbd nmbd

All of the configuration files are in /usr/local/etc (this is where
the FreeBSD port compiles the default location), and I do think they
are being read. What has been really bothering me is from my syslogd
messages, 

May  4 19:20:21 newmail inetd[130]: netbios-ns/udp: bind: Address already in use
May  4 19:30:21 newmail inetd[130]: netbios-ns/udp: bind: Address already in use
May  4 19:40:21 newmail inetd[130]: netbios-ns/udp: bind: Address already in use
..
..
..
May  5 00:00:22 newmail inetd[130]: netbios-ns/udp: bind: Address already in use
May  5 00:10:22 newmail inetd[130]: netbios-ns/udp: bind: Address already in use

Guess what time I started Samba. Then every 10 minutes I get this. How
should I change the nmbd line? Or do I have misconfigured NT
monste^H^H^H^H^H^Hmachines.

Question 2 & 3:
I managed to add my Samba machine to the NT domain server then use
smbpasswd to get things going. But I'm not sure how this works. The
two machines are not on the same LAN and the NetBIOS stuff is
unfamiliar. Even though I could smbpasswd to the machine and now can
smbclient to get some info (names and IP addresses sanitized),

% smbclient -L PC_NT1
Added interface ip=10.0.1.2 bcast=10.0.0.255 nmask=255.255.255.0
Added interface ip=10.0.0.7 bcast=10.0.0.31 nmask=255.255.255.224
Password: 
Domain=[NT_DOMAIN] OS=[Windows NT 4.0] Server=[NT LAN Manager 4.0]
..
..
..

But I cannot do something simple like,

% nmblookup PC_NT1
nmblookup PC_NT1
Sending queries to 10.0.1.255
name_query failed to find name PC_NT1

So question (2), why does 'smbclient' search through the various
interfaces I have specified in smb.conf, but 'nmblookup' does not? Note
that,

% nmblookup -U 10.0.0.102 PC_NT1
Sending queries to 10.0.0.102
10.0.0.102 PC_NT1<00>

Does work, but what's the point of a name lookup if I need to know the
machine's address to do it? ;)

I thought I could fix this problem by adding PC_NT1 to lmhosts, but it
did not fix it. Then I found this paragraph in 'man nmbd' which
absolutely baffles me, 

              The lmhosts file is a list of NetBIOS names  to  IP
              addresses  that  is  loaded  by the nmbd server and
              used via the name resolution mechanism name resolve
              order described in smb.conf (5) to resolve any Net-
              BIOS name queries needed by the server.  Note  that
              the  contents  of this file are NOT used by nmbd to
              answer any name queries. Adding a line to this file
              affects  name  NetBIOS  resolution  from  this host
              ONLY.

So nmbd loads lmhosts's IP addresses and NetBIOS names to resolve name
queries, but does not use them to answer queries... what does that
mean? (There's question 3, if you are counting.) That sounds
self-contradictory to me, but I suspect there is more to this story
and lmhosts is not like the supposedly anaolgous /etc/hosts in this
way.

Any kind souls out there who could lend me a clue or two about this
stuff? Perhaps point to where in the documentation I can find these
answers... Not being familiar with NT and NetBIOS all of this
documentation is a bit overwhelming (how many trees did I kill when I
put 'man smb.conf' to paper without checking how many pages it was).

Thanks for any help.
-- 
Crist J. Clark                           cjclark at home.com


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