[Samba] The "single WINS" problem

[Marcus White]

On Sat, 2005-11-26 at 09:29 +0100, Tomasz Chmielewski wrote:
> 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

Are you replicating the LDAP database to each network?

-- 
Marcus White <1midniterider at comcast.net>