WINS servers aren't, at least in theory, absolutely essential. I have
just found that over the years it makes locating/browsing for
Windows/Samba resources more reliable (espectially with multiple network
segments and multiple domains.) If you aren't using WINS, clients
will locate other machines via broadcasts.
If I understand everything correctly, WINS (name resolution) lets you
use a central server (vs broadcast) for locating Windows/Samba "servers"
(and by server this would include XP machine since they do can share
files and printers.) Part of finding machines is finding the master
browser, which then actually lists what shared resources are available
across all the machines. If you don't use WINS, machines can take
longer to show up in the Network Neighborhood.
So if the PDC goes down, the BDC should become the master browser
(listing available resources) and the clients should (eventually) give
up trying to locate machines via the specified WINS server and switch
back to broadcast. You could probably configure DHCP to assign
multiple WINS server IP parameters to your Win clients- and then if
your PDC looks like it will be down for a while you could make the BDC
be the wins server.
Unfortunately samba does not support WINS replication.
If my PDC does go offline, since it is also the primary file server,
WINS functionality becomes irrelevant.
On 12/04/09 11:10, Michael Wood wrote:
2009/12/2 Gaiseric Vandal<gaiseric.van...@gmail.com>:
[...]
Make sure that all machines are using the same WINS server. I have my PDC
as the WINS server.
What needs to be done if the PDC fails? Update the config on all the
machines to point to another WINS server?
--
To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
instructions: https://lists.samba.org/mailman/options/samba
