[Samba] Re: Understanding the role of DMB/LMB on a net that has a WINS server

[David Wuertele]

John, thank you for your detailed answers.  The roles of DMB/LMB are
much more clear to me now.  I also want to mention that the Samba
documentation is excellent, and I learned very much from the
NetworkBrowsing.html page.  Kudos to you for doing a great
documentation job!

I have two more questions.  The first:

Me> I was not able to discover whether nmbd is *required* to be
Me> running on a workstation that doesn't publish any shares, and just
Me> uses smbclient or smbmount to access other servers' shares.

John> Yes, nmbd is required - it provides the name resolution services
John> for smbd.

But I don't have to run smbd in order to be a client, do I?  In fact,
I know I don't, because I can run "smbclient //SOMESVR/SOMESHARE" from
my linux box, without that box running smbd or nmbd, and somehow the
share name and server name gets resolved.

So it seems to me that nmbd is *not* required to be running on a
workstation that doesn't publish any shares.  If that workstation will
never be used to publish shares or serve as a master browser, is there
any down-side to not installing nmbd?

Question two:

Are all types of netbios name that are listed in the table in
http://ubiqx.org/cifs/Appendix-C.html resolved by a WINS server?  For
example, I have a windows box that responds to nmblookup like this:

# nmblookup -A 192.168.0.111
Looking up status of 192.168.0.111
	ABCDMEDIA       <00> -         M <ACTIVE> 
	NOGROUP         <00> - <GROUP> M <ACTIVE> 
	ABCDMEDIA       <03> -         M <ACTIVE> 
	ABCDMEDIA       <20> -         M <ACTIVE> 
	NOGROUP         <1e> - <GROUP> M <ACTIVE> 
	NOGROUP         <1d> -         M <ACTIVE> 
	..__MSBROWSE__. <01> - <GROUP> M <ACTIVE> 

Would a WINS server store a record for each of the lines in this
response?  I saw mention that a WINS server only has to respond with
up to 25 name resolutions per request.  If a client makes a request
for "ABCMEDIA", and if there happens to be more than 25 different
records of various ABCMEDIA services, will some of those records not
get returned?

Thanks again for the excellent docs,
Dave