Samba and Lmhosts: HELP NEEDED

[Curtis Maurand]

I would hope that replication between nmbd servers was coming since one of
the good things (there are a couple) about the NT Versions of WINS servers
is that they will replicate information between each other.  Windows
machines are capable of having multiple WINS servers designated.

I would hope that your network is more reliable than what you infer,
especially if its a campus.  You can have a departmental WINS and a central
one.  primary is the central.  As for a single point of failure, you could
cluster a couple of 486's to do this job.  We're talking about a process
that has almost no load on it.  Its only memory intensive and not much of
that either.

NMBD on *nix is *very* reliable.  If you  have problems with network
connections dropping, then you have bigger troubles than the nmbd daemon
going away.  I'd be working on network reliability.  a common lmhosts file
is a bandaid.  Worse, how do you plan to keep it updated?  Do you intend to
have a process come get the latest and greatest lmhosts file periodically?
The idea becomes unworkable as your network grows over about 30 or 40
workstations.  If you're a college, you probably have hundreds.  Also if you
have a central file located on a server somewhere, you have the same single
point of failure that you had before since everytime a windows machine
reboots (and they do it much more often than anything else.) they need to
read that file.

Curtis


----- Original Message -----
From: "werner maes" <werner.maes at cc.kuleuven.ac.be>
To: "Curtis Maurand" <curtis at maurand.com>
Cc: <samba at us5.samba.org>
Sent: Friday, January 26, 2001 7:57 AM
Subject: Re: Samba and Lmhosts: HELP NEEDED


> Why we don't want to use one central WINS-server?
> We have several departements who still want to work (logon)
> when the central WINS server is down or when the network connection to the
> WINS server is down. When you have one central WINS server for all the
domain
> servers, you have a 'single point of failure'.
>
> Someone told me that there is a patch available that allows a WINS server
> to interact (query) other WINS servers. Have you heard of this?
>
> Thanks alot,
>
> Werner Maes
> LUDIT-KULeuven
>
>
>
> At 07:35 26/01/2001 -0500, Curtis Maurand wrote:
> >That scheme is why WINS was developed in the first place.  All machines
on
> >the network should be talking to the same WINS server regardless of the
> >domain.  that will solve your problem.  The WINS server could be halfway
> >around the world.  As long as hosts on your network can query it, it'll
> >work.
> >
> >Curtis
>
>