samba as wins-server

[David Landgren]

Florian Hengstberger wrote:
> Hi!
> I'm working in an office with several win hosts of all flavours
> (98,2000,eXPerience). Unfortunatly the resolution of computers takes
> sometimes up to half an hour (approx.) until they are accessible after
> booting up.
> In near future I'll have the chance to switch to FreeBSD with
> my box (at least, I hope so). I'll install samba for win access to my
> machine. Reading some documentation I've found out that samba
> can also act as a wins-server. Will this enhance the latency of netbios
> resolution or will it corrupt it?

Are you the admin of this network or just a user? Is the network 
switched or hubbed? It probably won't get worse, but half an hour seems 
pretty excessive, there is something wrong.

> Is there a way to speed up this process with samba,
> am I writing complete nonsense?

You will have to configure all the clients to direct their queries to 
the WINS server. If you're delivering addresses via DHCP, this can be 
communicated during address allocation, so that's not a problem. More of 
a hassle to update fixed-address machines, but even then modern Windows 
boxes no longer need to be rebooted for the changes to take effect.

If this is just your machine and you don't admin the others it will have 
zero effect.

> Tell me if this is true.

You might have other problems, I don't know. Have you run traces on your 
network to see what the traffic is?

David