Interesting WINS issue

[JustTrowItIn]

I got my Samba server (on RedHat 6.2) up and running on my NT domain yesterday. It's going to be a file and print server. Everything is running great! I can see the samba server in Network Neighborhood, browse the shared directories and printers, and even print. Now, here is where the problem is. The WINS name of my Samba server is SAMBASRV. If I go to a Windows box, I can "ping SAMBASRV" with no problems. When I go back to the Linux box however, and try to ping a windows workstation using WINS I receive "unknown host" errors. I can ping ip addresses from the linux box fine, it just won't ping using WINS names from the Linux box. Here is a copy of the relevant info from my smb.conf file (the actual ip address have been changed to protect the innocent):

wins proxy = No
wins server = 10.1.1.1
wins support = No
wins hook =

If anyone has any ideas (or if this is for some screwed up reason how samba is), let me know. Thanks!

[CablDeViL]

i am not sure but you may want to check your lmhost and host files to make sure all the network names are there.

This may or may not help im just tossing it out there. Let me know how it goes.

[jumpedintothefire]

The the config file for:


name resolve order = wins lmhosts host bcast

hope it helps

[JustTrowItIn]

I already changed my name resolve order to:

name resolve order = wins lmhosts host bcast
=================================
My lmhosts file is as follows:

127.0.0.1 localhost
=================================
My hosts file is:

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
10.1.1.2 Sambasrv Linux Samba Server
=================================

If WINs is working, does the hosts and lmhosts file even come into play? Any other ideas as to why this wouldn't be working?

[jumpedintothefire]

Any body got a current link to the "Using Samba" online book?

I had just d/l'ed when it became available, I not to sure where to find it now. I could mail it if you like.


check section 9.2 The Fault Tree

It has the check this first list.

[JustTrowItIn]

I'm downloading it right now from:
http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/chapter/book/indexpdf.html

I will go through the check list and let you know what I find out. Thanks!

[AlphaGeek]

http://samba.he.net/

[Stackrat]

It wont work. It will NEVER work that way. Linux doesn't know WINS. Samba does, but it doesn't share WINS information internally with the host OS (linux).

You would have to manually enter all of your network's hostnames and IPs into /etc/lmhosts in order to access hosts by hostname.

[singlespeed]

Of course you could set up a DNS server on your WinNT domain server. Good experience. Then point your resolv.conf to point to that server first. :)

[JustTrowItIn]

Well, after going through the checklist in my spare time, I have come back to the forum only to find out that it can't be done (Thanks BTW). Oh well, at least I know it wasn't a screw up on my behalf. I already have a DNS server on my NT domain, so I think I'll go play with resolv.conf. Thanks again to everyone for their help!

[Craig McPherson]

The previous post was correct -- the Linux resolver library does not not NOT do NetBIOS names, only DNS names. NetBIOS names are a foreign concept to the base Linux networking software, unlike Windows, where it's fairly tightly integrated, and most TCP utilities can look up NetBIOS names as easy as they can look up DNS names. Linux just don't do that. You can use the various Samba utilities to do NetBIOS names, but that's only because they're specifically written to look up and handle NetBIOS names.

You could consider moving all your DNS and WINS hosting to your Linux box, if you're feeling adventurous and such a solution would suit your needs. DNS on NT is considered sub-optimal by many people (more insecure than BIND, and that's saying a LOT). I did both DNS and WINS on Linux for a long time, then I moved the WINS service to an NT box and kept DNS on Linux, and that's working fine also.