samba as wins-server

Loren M. Lang lorenl at alzatex.com
Wed Feb 23 08:46:22 GMT 2005


On Tue, Feb 22, 2005 at 09:24:28AM +0100, Florian Hengstberger wrote:
> Hi!
> I'm working in an office with several win hosts of all flavours
> (98,2000,eXPerience). Unfortunatly the resolution of computers takes
> sometimes up to half an hour (approx.) until they are accessible after
> booting up.
> In near future I'll have the chance to switch to FreeBSD with
> my box (at least, I hope so). I'll install samba for win access to my
> machine. Reading some documentation I've found out that samba
> can also act as a wins-server. Will this enhance the latency of netbios
> resolution or will it corrupt it?

Do you mean that the resolution of a name to ip address takes a half an
hour or just that machines don't appear on the network for half an hour.
There are two parts to it.  One machine acts as a browse master and
keeps a list of names of all machines in it's workgroup.  There is an
election process that happens to determine who the master is.  When a
machine boots up it needs to alert the master that it exists, but that
can take a while sometimes with windows.  The second part is name to ip
resolution, this has nothing to do with the browse master.  Two type of
name resolution are broadcast and wins.  Wins is like a dns server where
all boxes register their name and ip address with.  Broadcast is more
like arp resolution only name to ip instead of ip to hw address.  Both
both broadcast and wins usually work immediately.  The only downfall to
broadcast is it only works when every computer is on the same subnet.
Most problems with computers showing up is which the browse
master/clients registering, not name resolution.  And even before the
browse master knows about the client, you can still access it by typing
in the name by hand, just not by going to network neighbor hood and
looking for it.

> 
> Is there a way to speed up this process with samba,
> am I writing complete nonsense?
> Tell me if this is true.
> 
> Yours, Florian
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
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NT leads to Bluescreen.
Bluescreen leads to downtime.
Downtime leads to suffering.
NT is the path to the darkside.
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