libnss_wins always performs a broadcast lookup.

[Adam Buchbinder]

Binary package hint: samba

I'm trying to get my workstation to use our Windows NT4 domain lookups, though I don't want to join the domain. To this end, I'm setting up WINS lookups.

I have the "wins server" set to my WINS server's IP address in /etc/samba/smb.conf, as well as "name resolve order = wins". I've added WINS to the name services

$ grep wins /etc/nsswitch.conf
hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] wins dns mdns4

The idea is that names should be checked against the WINS server first, and if that fails, they should be tried against DNS. However, all DNS lookups are now noticeably slow (around 0.8 seconds), since it's performing a broadcast search, which I can see in Wireshark: on a successful query, it checks the given WINS server. On an unsuccessful query, it checks the given WINS server, then sends three packets to the network broadcast address.

libnss_wins should respect the settings in smb.conf (since it *is* reading that file to get the WINS server address), and give up without trying time-consuming broadcasts.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.04
Package: winbind 2:3.3.2-1ubuntu3
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: samba
Uname: Linux 2.6.28-11-generic i686

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

Upstream says this was fixed in samba 4.2.0 and should then work correctly for all currently supported Ubuntu releases. The oldest one, Ubuntu Trusty, has samba 4.3.x in -updates.

Therefore I'm marking this as fix released in Ubuntu as well.