[Samba] "hosts allow" address resolution

[Christian R Molls]

Hi everybody,

apart from the clients in our Samba [1] server's subnet, we would like
to allow access from some selected outside machines as well. Those
people enter our network via VPN and are associated IPs that look like
the ones below:

         vpn-82-51.test.de       -->   173.237.82.51
         vpn-84-13.test.de       -->   173.237.84.13

Those users receive a new IP address every time they make a new VPN
connection; so the addresses are dynamic.

As not each and every of our VPN users is to be allowed onto our
server, I thought about setting up some kind of dyndns client on the
outside machines that associates the dynamic VPN IP address with a
dyndns hostname, like that:

         vpn-82-51.test.de       -->   173.237.82.51
         someaccount.dyndns.org  -->   173.237.82.51

I then modified smb.conf (173.237.79. is our subnet):

         hosts allow = 173.237.79. someaccount.dyndns.org

But alas, it does not work: I receive "connection denied" when I try to
connect to the server from the outside client machine. However, if I
modify the line above for testing purposes, like

         hosts allow = 173.237.79. vpn-82-51.test.de
         hosts allow = 173.237.79. 173.237.82.51

it works as expected and I am allowed to access the shares. Why does the
dyndns adress not work whilst the vpn-82-51.test.de address does, when
both resolve to the same numerical IP address? Any other ideas how to
solve the task?

Best regards from Cologne, Germany,
Christian

[1] Version 2.2.8a-0.9woody1 for Debian
-- 
christian molls
student of laws
univ of cologne