Required Services for Samba?

[Stephen L Arnold]

When the world was young, "Ken Walker" <kwalker at island.net> carved 
some runes like this:  

> I have been working on setting up IP MASQ on my home network (using 
> RH6 as server with dial up modem connection and Win98 on another 
> computer as a client) and making some changes to services the Linux 
> box runs with security concerns in mind.
[snip]
> The ones I removed were amongst this list: amd, autofs, gated, nfs, 
> nfsfs, routed, snmpd and ypbind.  I don't have much of a handle on 
> what these various services do but taking them away hasn't seemed to
> create any problems (except the one described below).
[snip]
> the usual screen will be replaced by a stream of error messages that seem
> to be coming from queries that the Win98 machine sends to the Samba server
> I run on the Linux machine.  The messages are not formatted properly but
> complain of the lack of a WINS server.  When I get these messages, if I
> type the clear command, I get my MC screen back and can carry on.

This is a samba/client issue (and should have nothing to do with 
the above services).  I don't have win98 at home (but our lone 98 
machine seems to co-exist peacefully with win95/samba on the work 
LAN).

There are various ways to do NetBIOS and/or DNS name resolution on 
a windoze/samba network; I would recommend enabling samba as a WINS 
server and point your client(s) at the IP address of the samba box 
(the samba box will also be the gateway for the win clients).  You 
can use your ISP's domain (for DNS stuff) on your home LAN or not, 
as you see fit (you can also run named on the RedHat machine in a 
caching-only setup, but according to those in the know the RedHat 
setup is barely adequate - I haven't mastered named/bind myself 
yet).  If you *do* use your ISP's domain, you should reverse the 
name order in /etc/hosts like this.  Instead of the standard:

IP address	FQDN			nickname
127.0.0.1	localhost.localdomain
192.168.0.2	sambahost.foo.bar	sambahost
...

use this instead:

IP address	nickname		FQDN
127.0.0.1	loopback		localhost
192.168.0.2	sambahost	sambahost.foo.bar
...

(notice the loopback address in RedHat is also broken)  Reversing 
the FQDN and nickname fields will stop DNS timeouts, etc (while 
telneting on your local LAN) until you get named setup right.

Later, Steve

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Stephen L Arnold                      http://www.rain.org/~sarnold
#include <std_disclaimer.h>
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