Hello all,

I have some questions regarding samba's wins configuration in an environment where samba has been integrated with Windows 2003 Active Directory. We do not use WINS in our Active Directory environment and only use DNS.
We have 2 samba servers, let's say they are named samba1 and samba2. samba1 is running 3.0.33-3.7.el5_3.1 and samba2 is running 3.0.28a-1ubuntu4.8.

Both of their configuration regarding WINS:
This seems to work fine but was wondering if there's a better configuration that I should be using.
If this is not an ideal configuration, should I configure one of the samba servers, let's say samba1 as WINS and thus, change the configuration on them as follows? Since we're not going to set WINS configuration on our Windows client machines, they won't register to WINS on samba server though:

change samba1's smb.conf:
change samba2's smb.conf:

would you not have the samba servers setup to use this:

It's something like that I have on mine.

Wins is a seriously ugly, very chatty, and unpredictable system. If it's on the same subnet as your windows clients, chances are that the windows clients will see it and use it anyway.

We are using samba as a wins server where I work, and it's OK, but there are many oddities to it, not to mention it generates a ton of broadcasts.

To give you an idea of the pain you'll have to deal with, consider this: wins runs as part of samba, so the wins server uses samba's resolve order: wins (itself) lmhosts hosts bcast. But since it's running in *nix it'll actually pull from DNS as well, even without the dns in "name resolve order". What this means to you is, it has three places it can pull information from, /etc/hosts & dns for basic information, and lmhosts for detailed information, such as what services or role a server provides. This gets very confusing! If there is a conflict (differing information), sometimes wins will resolve a name, and sometimes it won't.

In a large environment, this happens more times than you'd like. One admin adds a hostname/ip pair to wins, another one adds it to DNS or /etc/hosts. Sometime later, that IP is re-used by another system, or that system is given a new IP. Wins now goes nuts, and sometimes gives an IP, and sometimes claims it knows nothing.

After having that happen once, I tested it a few ways, and found that wins is very fragile. If you can avoid it, do.

If I put dns to the name resolve order, it generates an error in the log and doesn't recognize it.
We're not using WINS and it works but was just wondering if my current configuration can be setup better to handle name resolution.