[Samba] Mutli-Homed Subnetting - Advice please

[kissg]

Hi Jools,

I'm not an expert of this, but I have some ideas:

1, WINS was made exactly, what you would like to use it for. I should not
cause any problems, if you split your network to multiple subnets (as long
as you modify your firewall scripts according to the new topology). WINS is
part of nmbd, so if you set "wins support = Yes" in your smb.conf file, you
will have a working WINS server on every interface you have nmdb listening
on. Just configure your DHCP server to give the WINS server address to the
clients (DHCP option no. 44) and WINS name resolution should work from that
on. Also, setting NetBIOS node type to "P-mode" is a good idea (DHCP option
no. 46, set it to a value of 8). That way none of your clients will ever try
to broadcast any name resolution requests, they will send them immediately
to the WINS server, therefore causing less bandwidth usage.

2, I'm not an expert of this, but probably NFS would be the correct
solution. Dedicating a Gigabit Ethernet connection to this purpose should be
enough for ~300 users, I think.
I don't know too much about NFS drives, but as far as I know, you can mount
and use an NFS drive as if it were on the local computer. You can read more
about the NFS protocol on this site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_File_System_(protocol)

3, Create logon scripts for each group and add a command to the scripts like
this:

net use Z: %LOGONSERVER%\share_name

Append the following line to the [global] section of smb.conf:

logon script = %G.bat

That way, during a user logon, the appropriate logon script will be run on
the client machine. (I have never tried it yet, but it should work).


I hope, I could help you a bit.