On Dec 2, 2011, at 8:15 AM, Johnny Hughes wrote:
On 12/02/2011 08:54 AM, Lamar Owen wrote:
On Friday, December 02, 2011 08:42:42 AM Les Mikesell wrote:
[netbios naming is] like a roomfull of people yelling out their own name all the time as a means of identification with no way to handle those out of hearing distance or to arbitrate duplicates.
...
But that's a matter of luck, demanding that no one uses duplicates, and that all machines can broadcast to each other (i.e., no routers between them...).
WINS does not work this way. WINS works fine even when nodes are separated by routers and is the recommended way (at least by MS) to do SMB/CIFS name resolution in a routed network.
I agree with Lamar ... I use WINS on a routed VPN network that has a dozen offices that uses Samba on Linux (and OpenLDAP) as the Domain Controller. Samba has an option called:
remote announce http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/NetworkBrowsing.h...
and another called:
remote broswer sync http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/NetworkBrowsing.h...
These two options keep all my WINS/SMB networks synced all across the US.
---- indeed but to continue Les's fairly adept analogy, this is akin to running wires & a PA system to another office so the yelling happens not just in one room but in several rooms.
WINS itself is not routed but a workstation or a server is more than capable of announcing itself or participating in WINS activity on many subnets.
Craig