[Samba] Network browsing

[James Perry]

Hello all,

I've been able to successfully set up a small network, using Samba as  
a PDC. I'm currently using the latest updated version of Fedora 7,  
and the latest version of Samba. I'm really new to DNS and WINS, so  
please excuse my ignorance if I've completely overlooked something.  
Perhaps you could point me in the right direction...

My Samba server is set up as a domain controller, master browser, and  
I have it set to act as a WINS server. Everything on the client side  
seems to work wonderfully, except browsing. It is incredibly slow.  
I've set the client TCP/IP->Advanced->WINS settings to point to  
directly to the Samba server. All of the client machines pick up a IP  
and DNS server through a DSL cable modem, and not through the server  
(right now, I hope to change this as I go). The client is also set to  
use NetBIOS over TCP/IP. Now, if I manually enter a setting in the  
client hosts file, browsing is almost instantaneous. Without an entry  
in the hosts file, though, browsing slows to a crawl. I've certainly  
got a DNS issue going on here. To work around this, I had to put a  
entry in the hosts file on every single client in the network. I'm  
suspecting that I shouldn't have to do this, and DNS will handle IP  
address resolution for the server. All of our client machines are  
win2k at the moment.

My question is, is setting the server to act as a WINS server (with  
clients WINS server pointing to the server) enough, or do I need to  
enable DNS on top of that, and point clients to the server for DNS?  
Or, more generally, how have you folks set up your server/client  
networks to use your server as a WINS server... and have any of you  
experienced very slow network browsing and how have you resolved it?

Thank you all,
JP