Win95 name resolution ????

[Peter Polkinghorne]

Steven Law said:
> Can someone explain exactly how Windows does naming resolution ?
> Here's my setup and my problem ... 

> Windows 95 / Solaris 7 network with Samba 1.9.18

This is getting to be a somewhat old version of Samba.

> Windows PC with local IP and DNS servers defined and WINS turned off.
> I have NetBIOS using DNS for name resolution.

This is your problems - from experiments with NT and looking at Microsoft KB
docs, DNS for name resolution is only used after contacting a WINS server
(this is certainly the case for NT 4.0).

Alas the pages have gone from when I last looked at them on the microsoft site 
:-( and I can not find them now.

So what will happen is Broadcast and then nothing further.  If you have more
than 1 subnet WINS is pretty well essential.
The Samba WINS implementation is fine and as has been pointed out Netbios
names do not necessarily relate to DNS and also encode extra info in a flat
namespace.


-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Peter Polkinghorne, Computer Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH,|
| Peter.Polkinghorne at brunel.ac.uk   +44 1895 274000 x2561       UK          |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------