[KLUG Members] Setting netbios node type via ISC dhcpd (answer)

[Adam Williams]

>>Last night Mr. Brindleman asked how to set the netbios node type between
>>broadcast, hybrid, and point-to-point (WINS only) for Win32 clients.
>> dhcpOption: netbios-node-type 2
>Do you have something against the hybrid WINS-but-fall-back-to-broadcast
>model, such as a concern for security? IIRC, the Samba team promoted the
>hybrid model.

Our central office sets clients to the Hybrid model,  but remote sites are 
all set as point-to-point.  

In part this is simply an architecural thing.  
If your at a remote office (1) browseing for a server which are all at 
one of the two main offices site will never find anything (2) 
browse mastering is disabled on most Win32 clients so on a small LAN (they get as 
few as 8 workstations) may not even find a browse master to query.  It is 
cleaner just to fail if you can't contact WINS.

Another issue is laptops.  People wander about with them, and they are in 
large part beyond our adminstrative reach.  A WinY2k laptop deciding to 
announce itself as browse master or even domain master to Win9x boxes is a 
really confusing event.  Especially if that laptop is plugged in, the WAN 
circuit goes down (thanks Ameriwreck) the clients fall back to browse, 
find the laptop browse master, then the WAN circuit comes back up.... and 
they still can't find anything till they are rebooted - fun!  I've only 
had something like this happen once, but that was plenty.  And according 
to M$ docs it doesn't look like that ever *should* happen.....

We disabled browse master announce as we had a couple of Win32 
workstations that were calling for elections on a perpetual basis, and 
sending packets across the *WAN* saying "I'm the master now!",  then the 
Samba PDC would have to say "Like hell you are, I sill am!".  Disabling 
browse master capability outright seemed to fix it (the problem went 
away).  The M$ guy scratched his head, "it isn't supposed to do that".  
Now I just disable it as a matter of course.  The resulting name space 
outages only lasted a few seconds and never seemed to effect anything - 
but I don't like seeing queer stuff repeating in my logs.