[Samba] The "single WINS" problem

[Tomasz Chmielewski]

John H Terpstra schrieb:
> On Friday 25 November 2005 17:41, Andreas Hasenack wrote:
> 
>>Em Sexta 25 Novembro 2005 21:45, John H Terpstra escreveu:
>>
>>>With all due respect, I belive that your alarm and concern is a little
>>>excessive.
>>>
>>>What sort of response are you looking for? What are you hoping to achieve
>>>from
>>>your request?
>>
>>The point is not how often the wins service (or its machine) fails, but
>>what happens to the rest of the network when it does. Considering netbios
>>name resolution is not just about mapping name->IP, but also about locating
>>services (who is the logon server? who is the domain master browser?), a
>>single wins makes the windows network, which is already fragile, even more
>>so.
>>I've seen a wins server fail (kernel panic), and it wasn't pretty to the
>>rest of the network.
> 
> 
> That failure was not the fault of the WINS server. 

Certainly the kernel panic wasn't the fault of Samba running WINS, but 
the consequences point us to the limitations of Samba.

Even a single network disruption between WINS/PDC and the rest of your 
network can cause trouble similar to WINS/PDC kernel panicking.

To prevent such cases, where networks are separate (i.e. in different 
cities) but use a single user database (in LDAP), I just set up PDCs 
instead of BDCs (they don't see each other via netbios anyway), and each 
of them is acting as a WINS server.
I find it much more resistent to such failures.

-- 
Tomek
http://wpkg.org
WPKG - software deployment and upgrades with Samba