[Samba] Help: issues about hostname & nameserver

[tubocurarine]

Dear developers:

I'm using Samba-3.5.8 on Linux (Gentoo, amd64) as a file server, and using some Windows based OSes as clinet. And something strange happened to me.

Things went as follows:

1. If there was no dot (".") in the hostname of server, then no matter whether the DNS server (in /etc/resolv.conf) was set correctly or not, everything went fine. Client can access shares (provided server) normally.

2. If there was dot in hostname of server, and if the DNS Server was set correctly (or just left as blank), server worked normally.

3. If there was dot in hostname of server, and the DNS Server was set incorrectly, all client could not connect to the server, with a message indicated that the address of server could not be accessed.

My friend and I payed some time on it. We found that in the last situation, the Samba server may spend a long time to look up the computer name (name of server or client). But before the look up ends, the client would treat this as a timeout.

I don't know whether we are right about this. And if we were, why everything goes fine in the 2nd case?

Any information will be appreciated.

Best regards.

Tubo

2011-04-27