[Samba] Recovery from Domain/WINS Outage - Didn't work well

[John H Terpstra]

On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, Hall, Ken (ECSS) wrote:

> We're using Samba 2.2.5 and 2.2.7 in SECURITY=DOMAIN mode.
>
> This morning we lost contact with our PDC, and for about 2 hours, users
> were unable to logon.  After chasing this down, we determined that we
> were also unable to contact the WINS server defined in smb.conf.  Our
> backup WINS server was available, but it seems Samba only supports one
> WINS server in smb.conf, so this didn't help much.  After manually
> switching to the other WINS server, we were able to connect.
>
> We're still new with this, and so far Samba isn't looking too reliable
> to our management.  This is the second time a WINS-related problem has
> knocked us down while the Windows servers remained available.
>
> I'm assuming we're still only allowed to specify a single WINS server.
> Does anyone have any idea if this will be fixed anytime soon?

Yes, in Samba-3.0.0 which is currently in Alpha test. Should be released
around April. You might want to download it and try it before then. We can
do with your feedback.

>
> Should Samba have recovered from the DC outage?  It appears that after
> losing contact with the DC, it went back to WINS, and tried to get a new
> list.  Does it only try the first DC on the list, or does it work down
> till it finds a good one?  Am I correct in assuming that being unable to
> connect to the WINS server would prevent this from happening?

If Samba can not resolve the netbios name to an IP address then obviously
it can not find the machine it needs to communicate with. If WINS goes
down, then in effect you can be hosed.

- John T.
-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org