samba as wins-server

[Florian Hengstberger]

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?

Is there a way to speed up this process with samba,
am I writing complete nonsense?
Tell me if this is true.

Yours, Florian

[David Landgren]

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?

Are you the admin of this network or just a user? Is the network
switched or hubbed? It probably won't get worse, but half an hour seems
pretty excessive, there is something wrong.

> Is there a way to speed up this process with samba,
> am I writing complete nonsense?

You will have to configure all the clients to direct their queries to
the WINS server. If you're delivering addresses via DHCP, this can be
communicated during address allocation, so that's not a problem. More of
a hassle to update fixed-address machines, but even then modern Windows
boxes no longer need to be rebooted for the changes to take effect.

If this is just your machine and you don't admin the others it will have
zero effect.

> Tell me if this is true.

You might have other problems, I don't know. Have you run traces on your
network to see what the traffic is?

David

[Florian Hengstberger]

I'm not the admin, I own a normal workstation. I just wanted
to know if setting up samba as an wins-server improves
the speed of netbios resolution.
It seems to me that I'll get in trouble when other XP boxes are around,
because I've heard that the first win XP box on the net rules the workgroup an
manages all netbios stuff.
By the way: If samba conflicts with XP, how do XP machines
manage not to get in trouble if there is more than one XP box?

Thanks,
Florian


David Landgren <david@landgren.net> schrieb:

> 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?

>
> Are you the admin of this network or just a user? Is the network
> switched or hubbed? It probably won't get worse, but half an hour seems
> pretty excessive, there is something wrong.
>

> > Is there a way to speed up this process with samba,
> > am I writing complete nonsense?

>
> You will have to configure all the clients to direct their queries to
> the WINS server. If you're delivering addresses via DHCP, this can be
> communicated during address allocation, so that's not a problem. More of
> a hassle to update fixed-address machines, but even then modern Windows
> boxes no longer need to be rebooted for the changes to take effect.
>
> If this is just your machine and you don't admin the others it will have
> zero effect.
>

> > Tell me if this is true.

>
> You might have other problems, I don't know. Have you run traces on your
> network to see what the traffic is?
>
> David
>
> _______________________________________________
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> [url]http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions[/url]
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>

[David Landgren]

Florian Hengstberger wrote:

> I'm not the admin, I own a normal workstation. I just wanted
> to know if setting up samba as an wins-server improves
> the speed of netbios resolution.
> It seems to me that I'll get in trouble when other XP boxes are around,
> because I've heard that the first win XP box on the net rules the workgroup an
> manages all netbios stuff.
> By the way: If samba conflicts with XP, how do XP machines
> manage not to get in trouble if there is more than one XP box?

Your admins probably already have a WINS server, you should point to it
and you'll be set. Look at the 'wins server' parameter in smb.conf.

As to how XP boxes get on with each other, they hold elections, and the
host with the most votes wins (more or less). The exact parameters that
control the outcome are:

os level
preferred master
domain master
local master

Samba documentation explains this pretty well.

David

[Loren M. Lang]

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
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> [email]freebsd-questions@freebsd.org[/email] mailing list
> [url]http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions[/url]
> To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"

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