On Sat, 2011-09-03 at 17:51 -0700, Kenneth Porter wrote:
My client Windows XP boxes are failing to register with my WINS server (running nmbd from Samba). I'm puzzled how to figure out what I'm doing wrong.
Background: I'm setting up BackupPC to back up my Windows clients using rsync. I've installed cwRsync to the clients. BackupPC uses nmblookup to find the client's IP address given its Windows NETBIOS name.
I'm distributing the WINS server address via DHCP and see it on the client using "ipconfig /all". I can run tcpdump on the server (filtering for this client and the NETBIOS port) and see the register/response sequence at UDP 137:
MULTIHOMED REGISTRATION; REQUEST; UNICAST REGISTRATION; POSITIVE; RESPONSE; UNICAST REGISTRATION; REQUEST; UNICAST REGISTRATION; POSITIVE; RESPONSE; UNICAST
If I signal the nmbd process with SIGHUP to make it dump its table to nmbd.log, I don't see client in the list. I do see the server and my Windows Active Directory server's records in the list, but no clients.
nmblookup finds the client by broadcast (the client responds with the record) but nmblookup -U 127.0.0.1 says there's no record of it. (A query for the server's own record finds it, so I know the WINS service is at least working to that degree.)
So why is nmbd not remembering client records?
---- do you have 'wins support = yes' in your smb.conf on the system that is supposed to be the wins server?
Is this system running backuppc a different computer? If so, does it have 'wins server = $IP.Address.Of.WINS_Server' ? in smb.conf?
Do all WinXP systems use the ip address for this system as the wins server?
Are they all on the same network/subnet?
What is the 'os level' of this wins server? Is it higher than 32? (I'd probably make it > 64)
Did you examine the wins.tdb by using tdbdump?
Are you aware that elections take 15 minutes? If you actually restart the nmbd process on your samba based wins server, you need to wait to get a browsing list.
Craig