[Samba] The "single WINS" problem

[Jeroen van Meeuwen]

> Subject: Re: [Samba] The "single WINS" problem
> 
> On Thu, Nov 24, 2005 at 09:38:29PM +0100, Jeroen van Meeuwen wrote:
> >
> > > Subject: [Samba] The "single WINS" problem
> > >
> > > Everybody encourages Samba admins to enable WINS whenever possible,
> and
> > > I agree that it helps a lot to solve these networks' problems. It's so
> > > good that, when it fails, it's a disaster.
> > >
> > > How are people coping with the samba limitation of not being able to
> > > replicate the WINS database and thus its inability to have more than
one
> > > WINS server in a domain?
> > >
> >
> > I'm in a hybrid environment using both linux and Windows, and I prefer
not
> 
> Who is the PDC? Linux or Windows?
> 

In fact, there is no real PDC, but I understand what you mean. My two
Windows 2003 boxes are Domain Controllers, DNS runs on a bind-9.3.1 linux
box.

> > to use WINS. It would mess up the DDNS environment I currently have set
up,
> > since at some point Windows still gives WINS a higher priority over DNS.
> > Linux, of course, doesn't really care ;)
> 
> So you use DNS for netbios name resolution? Or have you configured samba
> to not use netbios? Is it a single network (i.e., broadcast name
> resolution works)?

The Netbios names that are set in smbd/nmbd, are already registered with DNS
when the network comes up (Dynamic DNS). This will only work properly if you
have one single Netbios name per machine (Or run several instances on a
multi-homed box).

Windows boxes (NT 5.1 and later) are used to primarily look up 'simple
hostnames' (hostnames without a DNS suffix, whether in a Netbios context or
not), suffixed with the system DNS Domain suffix (list), or connection
specific domain suffix (set by, for example, DHCP). I find that Windows is
'confused' as soon as I also provide a WINS server (but hey, didn't I expect
at least one undocumented feature??).

Kind regards,

Jeroen van Meeuwen

--
kanarip