Hi! I am having a problem with configuring samba to forward wins traffic to another segment on the network. The box in question is on a segment on the DMZ and we need to have it forward all wins destined for port 137 UDP to a server on the internal LAN. What I have read is that WINS is does not traverse through routers. I learned this by doing a

nmblookup mydomain

and discovered it was sending traffic to the broadcast address on my subnet of 172.168.0.255 and timing out. My question is how do we forward Wins traffic from one segment to another?

I put the following line in my smb.conf

wins support = no
wins server = 192.168.5.3

Which I thought was to force all wins traffic to not go to the broadcast address but send directly to the wins server at 192.168.5.3. However no traffic traverses.

One solution I was thinking of was to write an iptables rule on the local host that says any traffic going to the broadcast address 172.168.0.255 with UDP port 137 send to our wins server at 192.168.5.3 port UDP 137.

Is this possible and widely done? I can't seem to get samba to forward all Wins request to another server and have been banging away for a couple of hours. Any insight into this problem would be appreciated.

Thanks

Hello,

this is standard behaviour of MS-OS if not otherwise told they will broadcast for the netbios-name.

Add to your DHCP-Configuration
option netbios-node-type 8; and
option netbios-name-servers 192.168.5.3;

with this configuration your MS-Clients will ask 192.168.5.3 and if this gives no result they will broadcast.

HTH

Karpi, thanks for the reply but this is a Linux server on the DMZ, its trying to perform a query to a Windows WINS server using samba-client. I cannot get the Wins traffic to go directly to a Wins server it continues to broadcast looking for a WINS server on the DMZ subnet but doesn't get a response.