[KLUG Members] re: administration of windows from linux (kinda)

[Adam Williams]

>>Adam, when you did the presentation you said that it is possible to
>>set the windows workstations to use the wins server for the listing
>>that shows up in "my network places".  How do you do that exactly?? 
>>I am working towards nuking my Win2000 Active Directory server and
>>going to a Linux Samba server for the main server in my
>>classroom.....  
>If you' have something (probably your friendly neighborhood Linux 
>server) serving DHCP, it's pretty easy.  You just need to have the DHCP 
>server pass out a WINS server IP address, and a node-type that uses 
>WINS.  The following snippet from dhcpd.conf should do the trick. 
>  option netbios-name-servers <WINS server IP>;
>  option netbios-node-type 8;

Except a node-type of 8 won't eliminate the use of broadcast.  You want a 
node type of 2 (p-node) which uses [in order] Cache, WINS, host file, DNS.  
A type 8 node (h-node) uses [in order] Cache, WINS, Broadcast, LMHOSTS, 
host file, DNS.  So broadcast still gets used, elections must still occur, 
and broadcast add/delete operations can still effect the cache contents.  
Personally I see no advantage to having broadcast resolution around at 
all, all it does it obfuscate things - especially on a multi-segment or 
routed network.

>Of course, something on the network needs to be serving WINS, but Samba 
>can do that.

It is also pretty easy to propagate WINS events into DNS (or LDAP) using a 
"wins hook" script.  If you do that and enable "dns proxy", then *POOF* 
you've got a nearly complete redundant WINS solution.  

dns proxy (G)
Specifies that nmbd when acting as a WINS server and finding that 
a NetBIOS name has not been registered, should treat the NetBIOS name 
word-for-word as a DNS name and do a lookup with the DNS server for that 
name on behalf of the name-querying client.