[CentOS] WINS server (nmbd) puzzle

Kenneth Porter shiva at sewingwitch.com
Tue Sep 6 18:33:08 UTC 2011


--On Tuesday, September 06, 2011 12:25 PM -0700 Kenneth Porter 
<shiva at sewingwitch.com> wrote:

> Found it in /var/cache/samba. It has the record I want, but nmblookup
> unicast fails. nmblookup broadcast works, but that gets it from the
> workstation, not the WINS server, and the point of WINS is to get rid of
> the broadcast traffic.

Found it! When studying the man page for nmblookup I spotted the 
requirement that I need to provide -R with -U to force recursion.

Here's the -U option:

> Do a unicast query to the specified address or host unicast address. This
> option (along with the -R option) is needed to query a WINS server.

Here's the entry for the -R option:

> Set the recursion desired bit in the packet to do a recursive lookup.
> This is used when sending a name query to a machine running a WINS server
> and the user wishes to query the names in the WINS server. If this bit is
> unset the normal (broadcast responding) NetBIOS processing code on a
> machine is used instead. See RFC1001, RFC1002 for details.

So why would you use -U without -R? Seems an odd and error-prone command 
design.



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