Samba and WINS

[Alex H. Vandenham]

It looks like my problem was caused by a temporary unavailability of the WINS
server.  That's going to be my biggest headache for what I'm trying to do.  The
objective is to set up a VPN between multiple locations over the big bad
internet and permit browsing between all the lans (all with different and even
multiple workgroups)  using samba servers as the master browser, domain master
and wins server.  The limitations of Samba (can't be a backup browser,
secondary wins server, etc) are going to be a big problem since it means I can
only have one WINS server for the whole network.  Hard to believe it will be
available full time!  I can get it to work as long as everything is STABLE.

Do you know of any way to force a refresh of the WINS data, or to force the
WinPCs to renew their WINS registration (without a reboot).  Or do you know
how often the Win PCs renew their WINS registration (is it really 6 days???
and can it be changed?)  I never thought I would say this but, I wish I knew
more about how WINS works.  

Thanks for your suggestions

Alex

On Thu, 06 Jan 2000, you wrote:
> Hmm. Very strange...  I would say, take a look at the wins.dat file on your
> Samba WINS server, and check for entries like "<WORKGROUP>#1b".  If this isn't
> there for each of the workgroups, then I think it indicates that the Samba
> servers haven't registered properly with the WINS server.
> 
> If those entries *are* there, it's possible that Windows will only query a
> browse master that's on the local subnet.  I don't have much experience with
> this scenario: generally, I use workgroups that are consistent across subnets.
> If you aren't too attached to your current workgroup names, you might try this
> as well; it's certainly the quickest solution I see.
> 
> -Steve Langasek
> postmodern programmer