[Samba] winbindd hosts and nsswitch

[Richard Otten]

I have a need for my Linux (2.2.20 kernel) application to resolve names
which are only stored in WINS.  To this end I am trying the winbindd
daemon which is bundled with Samba 2.2.3a.

I'm not at all interested in file sharing, user authentication, or any
of the other wonderful features of Samba for this project.

First I tried setting everything up with the Binary distribution for
Red Hat 6.2.  This seemed to go ok - wbinfo certainly works fine.

Other applications do not.

When I try something simple - "ping pchostname" - and wrap it with strace
I can definitely see the libnss_winbindd.so library is opened and parsed.

Unfortunately no logging is taking place which might indicate why the
library is unable to resolve a WINS host name (while wbinfo has no problem).

I tried bumping up the debug level on winbindd to '100'.  Still, no logging
takes place when I do a "ping pchostname".    (wbinfo does indeed generate a
lot of log information at this level though)

Next I removed the pre-built package and tried grabbing and building Samba 
from source.

I still get the exact same symptoms.  wbinfo works fine.  ping loads the
library, but doesn't find anything in WINS.

What else can I try?  
Does it work?

The documentation doesn't really discuss the 'hosts' option very much.
I assume this means it works really well (and I'm missing something), or it 
doesn't work very well at all.

How does "hosts.conf" fit into all this?
It seems redundant to nsswitch.conf.  I've tried adding 'winbind' to hosts.conf
as well, but the resolver urps on it.

PS:  The README in the source/nsswitch directory could use an update.
     It still references libnss_wins.so rather than libnss_winbind.so ...

-- 
Rick Otten
O=='=++