[Samba] Abnormal Windows behaviour with Samba

[Erebus]

Gary Dale wrote:
> 
> A question I would have is can you track down exactly when the problem 
> occurs? You said it doesn't happen all of the time. Are there certain 
> conditions that you can identify about when the problem occurs? Does it 
> happen only on certain account, machines, when the server or network is 
> busy...?
> 

Thank you for the response.

No, really, there are no certain conditions that this problem occurs (or I
am unable to find any relation between different factors that may affect
this). After trying all possible solutions (like using WINS support in
Samba, using registry hacks on Windows side to have a synchronous boot and
so on), I 've thought that this problem might occur because of network or
server traffic/load. However this is not true. The server is a double Xeon
with 1024 MB RAM and two SATAII 500 GB HDs (Ubuntu server installed).
However it has very low traffic in general and on it only Samba, DHCPd,
proxy and socks servers are installed (with little use of all of them
actually).

I am pretty sure now, that the problem has to do with the way Windows does
name resolves. And I need a little help on this from you guys. From what I
know, Windows uses by default NetBIOS over TCP/IP (which is the default
option by the way). So I have the following questions:

1) If NetBIOS is working well between Samba and XP, why I had the same
problem a year ago in another similar installation? The problem then
disappeared when I used WINS support (which didn't solved the same problem
on this new installation now).

2) When using WINS, Windows are trying to find the NetBIOS name first and if
they fail they then ask the WINS server? What is the exact sequence of the
name resolving in Windows?

3) I know that there is a way to change that name resolving method on Linux.
Is there a way to change it on Windows too? I.e. to ask first the WINS, then
DNS, then LMHOSTS etc.

4) A friend of mine told me that WINS is no longer supported (or even
working?) after Windows 2000 (and of course in XP). He said it has been
totally replaced by DNS now. Maybe using a local DNS server would be the
final solution to all this? Is this right and logical?

Thank you all in advance for your help,

Konstantinos
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