[wellylug] samba server and dhcp

[Sam Cannell]

This isn't strictly true.

By default, Windows will not use DNS to resolve netbios names - it's a
feature you can enable in the TCP/IP options.

Also if you want to use DNS resolution rather than the other methods of
netbios name resolution, you will need to assign each machine a fixed IP
address and set up a DNS server to handle requests.

The other thing to note is that it's generally not a good idea to use a
domain search list.  The reason is that every dns request is first tried
with each of the domains in the search list _before_ it is attempted on
its own.

For example, if you have the following in your domain search list:

local.fakedomain.co.nz
fakedomain.co.nz

When you try to go to, say, www.google.com, your PC will try to resolve
the following addresses, in this order:

www.google.com.local.fakedomain.co.nz
www.google.com.fakedomain.co.nz
www.google.com

In other words, you're doing three DNS lookups when you should only be
doing one.

To compound this, if your DNS server does not have a fakedomain.co.nz
zone set up, it will attempt to resolve the above names via the standard
DNS fashion.  On a congested or low-speed connection, this can take a
non-trivial amount of time.

Leave the domain search list empty unless you have a damn good reason
for enabling it.  Given that there are other (far simpler) solutions to
getting netbios name resolution working, this is definitely not a damn
good reason. :)

Sam

-----Original Message-----
From: wellylug-admin at lists.naos.co.nz
[mailto:wellylug-admin at lists.naos.co.nz] On Behalf Of Michael Dittmer
Sent: Saturday, 8 May 2004 10:01 a.m.
To: wellylug at lists.naos.co.nz
Subject: RE: [wellylug] samba server and dhcp

Hi Phillip

In your Smoothwall setup did you include a domain suffix (eg:
domain.lan)
for your DHCP server, if not you will need to as this passes the domain
suffix to the Smoothwall DNS server for doing lookups. I had this
problem
here at home when I was testing Smoothwall 2.0 Express.

Also, in your Windows PC, in the network settings you need to add the
domain
suffix as well. Again, I know this from experience.