[Samba] Samba 3 WINS management

[Gary Dale]

I'm running a Debian/Wheezy 64bit Samba 3.6.6 server and I'm trying to 
solve some name resolution issues I've been having.

While I've never been able to ping the domain name on any Samba 3 domain 
I've set up (so far as I know - I've only tested it on the two that I am 
currently administering), some people on this list have suggested that I 
should be able to and it should return the address of a domain 
controller. I was able to get this to work on one Windows 7 client by 
putting the following two lines into its lmhosts file:
192.168.1.17    <server name>#20
192.168.1.17    <domain name>#1b

Obviously this kind of kludge shouldn't be required. To make matters 
more interesting, my ability to ping the domain name seems to have 
vanished despite the lmhosts file still being there. I can still ping 
computer names however, so this doesn't look like a firewall or 
capability issue.

Digging further into Samba 3 WINS services, I looked at the wins.dat 
file for the server and found a similar line in the file:
"<domain name>#1b" 1409406400 192.168.1.17 64R

So should I be able to ping the domain name or is this something that 
only happens in Samba 4?