visionfs wins name resolution

From: "Brian K. White" <brian@aljex.com>
Subject: Re: Where to set machine name
Date: 18 Aug 2005 11:39:33 -0400
Message-ID: <014001c5a40a$fa227e80$6b00000a@venti> 
References: <KDQMe.6794$mb4.1756@tornado.rdc-kc.rr.com> 


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David" <djpogoff@complexnet.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sco.misc
Sent: Wednesday, August 17, 2005 8:29 PM
Subject: Where to set machine name


>A few years ago I did something useful and I now find that I've completely
> forgotten what I did.
>
> One of my clients has a LAN with a few Windows machines (NO servers) and 
> an
> SCO Unix machine (Release 5).  The SCO box is not running any DNS service.
> What I had done is assigned the SCO box a name so that when a Windows user
> telnets to the SCO machine the name is somehow resolved.  I seem to recall
> that I edited some text file on the SCO machine but I cannot remember 
> where.
>
> Any help is tremendously appreciated.  Thanks.
>
> David

My first guess is you installed an smb server on the sco box.

An smb server makes a unix box appear in windows network neighborhood like 
another windows machine.

Windows machines will fall back on netbios browse lists and WINS (netbios 
name service) in place of dns even for treaditional types of network apps 
that normally wouldn't be associated with "windows file & print sharing" and 
"network neighborhood". If a machine is not in dns, but does show up in 
network neighborhood, then you can for example "telnet computername" and 
it'll work from a windows machine.

There are at least 3 possible smb servers, VisionFS, FacetWin, and Samba.
They'll all behave as you describe out of the box without explicitly 
configuring anything other than simply turning them on, because by default 
they use the regular hostname as the netbios computer name (what shows up in 
networkneighborhood).

Or, you can override that and specify any computername you want.
They each have their own very different ways of being configured.

FacetWin is done by uncommenting and editing a variable in 
/usr/facetwin/facetwin.cfg

Samba has smb.conf, which might be located any of several places depending 
on the version of samba and who built it, where you got it from etc...

VisionFS I've willfully forgotten all about. Probably some command in 
/usr/vision/bin. I do seem to remember you shouldn't edit the files directly 
but use various admin utils instead because the files are unicode not plain 
ascii.

It's a shaky protocol to count on though. You can do everything exactly 
right and have it not work, and then work fine a few hours or a day later 
without touching anything. If some machines IP changes, it can break again 
and stay broken until some or all machines (including the sco box) have been 
rebooted etc... Usually it's fine but when it's not theres not always a 
rhyme or reason for it and you waste time trying to fix it. Sometimes it 
helps to configure all the pc's by filling in the WINS option in the tcp/ip 
properties with the sco box IP, and sometimes that's the worst thing to do, 
depending on if the pc's are configured to use dhcp and on how well the smb 
server on the sco box deals with pc's ip's changing.

Brian K. White  --  brian@aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
+++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++.
filePro  BBx    Linux  SCO  FreeBSD    #callahans  Satriani  Filk!

Got something to add? Send me email.

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