[Pkg-samba-maint] Bug#591752: Bug#591752: samba-common: please change the name resolv order

[Steve Langasek]

On Fri, Aug 06, 2010 at 12:03:02PM +0200, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 05, 2010 at 02:27:57PM +0200, Fabian Greffrath wrote:
> > Please don't get me wrong, I know this is absolutely not samba's but 
> > our ISP's fault. But by internet research I found quite a lot of 
> > people with similar problems and would thus like to propose a general 
> > resolution for this problem. This solution would be to put "bcast" 
> > before "host"  in the name resolv order list and only have the latter 
> > as a fallback, i.e. "lmhost bcast host wins".

> The reason why we do it this way is the additional timeout
> we would run into. More and more networks have DNS
> configured these days, and if we put broadcast before DNS,
> we would run into a timeout before we tried DNS every single
> time. A better way might be to do all the methods in
> parallel, but if *some* method gives a positive result, how
> do we judge if that is actually the result you desire?

FWIW, a semi-frequent request I've seen is to have wins listed before host,
with bcast left at the end.  This avoids the broadcast timeout issue, and
only has an effect if WINS is actually configured - if you don't have a WINS
server configured, it can't delay things, and if you do have a WINS server
configured, perhaps it should take precedence over DNS which everyone has?

I'm not entirely sold on this idea which is why I have never advocated it to
upstream; WINS is still pretty legacy and inferior to real DNS and I
strongly prefer that users beat their ISPs into providing proper DNS service
instead.  But enough people are affected by this that it may be worth
discussing.

(Obviously, any network that /has/ to fall back all the way to broadcast to
resolve names is broken anyway and we shouldn't encourage /that/ in the
default config.)

-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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