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March 06, 2006
Advertising the WINS Service
Thus far, the household Samba DC appears to be functioning quite well. I’ve been able to add member machines without trouble, providing I manually create the machines’ POSIX accounts in advance, and domain log in works without a hitch. I have had difficulty with one laptop running Windows XP/Pro. When I try to get it to join the domain, it claims to be unable to find the DC. Odd, because when I attempt to use services on the DC from that laptop as a non-domain member; mapping drives, locating printers and what not, it works fine.
Reviewing what the client knew about the DC, via ipconfig /all amongst other sources, I noticed that there was no default WINS server. That’s probably because I didn’t include any such definition in the DHCP configuration files. And that is most likely because there’s nothing in the ISC dhcpd configuration that uses the term WINS. What it’s really called is the NetBIOS name server. So, I’ve added the following couple of lines to the local subnet section in /usr/local/etc/dhcpd.conf.
option netbios-name-servers 192.168.0.5;
option netbios-node-type 8;
Haven’t had a chance to try out the stubborn laptop again to see if will now join the domain. One step at a time.
Filed under Software, Networking, FreeBSD, Samba, Domain Controller, WINS.
Posted by eric at March 6, 2006 10:42 AM