Netbios alias -max names or chars

MCCALL,DON (HP-USA,ex1) don_mccall at hp.com
Wed Apr 4 23:42:17 GMT 2001


Hi Mark,
I thought I'd better test this myself - no good guessing.

Well, there IS a problem after all; see, to make sure that some bad
configuration, etc doesn't end up writing endlessly into a string, and
gobbling up memory, we use a string type of 'pstring',
which is defined:

typedef pstring[1024];

and we use this typedef on one of the variables used somewhere during the
parsing/setting the netbios alias string when we start nmbd...

Which essentially limits the size of the alias list to be no more characters
than 1024 (including delimiting spaces between the aliasnames).

So you COULD get 260 alias names in there, but they would be severly limited
as to the number of characters for each alias, which doesn't sound very
friendly to me....

Sorry, I didn't take this into account when I replied before...
Don






-----Original Message-----
From: Wilson, Mark - MST [mailto:Mark.Wilson2 at airnz.co.nz]
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 6:05 PM
To: 'MCCALL,DON (HP-USA,ex1)'
Subject: RE: Netbios alias -max names or chars


Don

Thanks for the fast reply. I am involved in a large project where we are
migrating a bunch of apps off about 15 machines (Small suns through a bunch
of E6000's). There are about 260 applications and we are going to put them,
initially, on one E10k. Many of these apps require Samba access. The
standard here is that each app must have it's own DNS entry and therefore
for those using samba, their own netbios name.

In terms of Network traffic I don't think that there will be much difference
as these apps already have their own netbios name, just spread around a
number of machines. I want to make sure that we *can* put that many netbios
aliases on the one samba instance.

Cheers

Mark

-----Original Message-----
From: MCCALL,DON (HP-USA,ex1) [mailto:don_mccall at hp.com]
Sent: Thursday, 5 April 2001 09:48
To: 'Wilson, Mark - MST'; 'samba-technical at lists.samba.org'
Subject: RE: Netbios alias -max names or chars


Hi Mark,
The variable that holds this info is Globals.szNetBiosAliases;
Globals is a type struct,
and szNetbiosAliases is char *szNetbiosAliases
so theoretically, it has no fixed size limit;  I didn't see any arbitrary
limit as to the number of aliases the method used to read in this parameter
being set either.
But there are other considerations in terms of performance and network
traffic,
as each one of the aliases is going to be broadcast/registered with wins
server, etc.
at startup, and periodically after that...
You might want to share more of what you are doing and why; someone on the
list might
have a 'better' way of implementing your solution.
Hope this helps,
don

-----Original Message-----
From: Wilson, Mark - MST [mailto:Mark.Wilson2 at airnz.co.nz]
Sent: Wednesday, April 04, 2001 5:28 PM
To: 'samba-technical at lists.samba.org'
Subject: Netbios alias -max names or chars


Hello all
 
Can someone tell me the maximum amount of names or characters that can be
put on the "netbios aliases" line in the smb.conf. We have situation where
we potentially need to put up to 200 names on the line (big machines, one
name per application).
 
Cheers
 
Mark

P.S. Apologies for the large disclaimer. 

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