Myside's Spew - Blog of Spontaneous Combustible Spew

Lightweight WINS Server - LWINS

19 June, 2011 09:07 CST6CDT

I use a Cobalt RAQ (MIPS) for most of my general network services.  These services include DHCP, BIND (DNS), SMTP, NTP, and WINS.  I decided to look around to replace Samba's NMBD WINS service and came across the LWINS project.

LWINS is a lightweight WINS server capable of running on memory restricted devices and is independent from SAMBA. WINS implements the NetBIOS protocol over TCP/IP. LWINS also supports replication with MS-WINS servers. Robustness of the protocol stack is a very high priority so that malformed packets cannot be used to crash LWINS, or gain access to the machine running LWINS. However, the security of the network is limited as the protocols were not designed with security in mind.

The LWINS project states that the server is intended for OpenWRT (Linux), however it will compile on any platform with restricted resources making it a perfect candidate for my RAQ with 96MB of RAM running Debian Squeeze.  With a modification of the makefile, you should be able to successfully compile LWINS on ARM, MIPS, or any other architecture provided you have the basic general required libraries that are installed in most Linux, BSD, etc. operating systems and distributions.

Currently on my home network, LWINS is using a mere 708KB of RAM monitoring 6 computers or devices that take advantage of WINS and NetBIOS over TCP/IP.  My only suggestion would be to run this application as root commenting out the appropriate lines in the example configuration file provided as some OS installations prohibit management of privileged ports to unauthorized user accounts.

[http://www.lwins.org/]

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Software  Projects  Article & Comments (1)

E-Mail from LWINS Development

"Thanks for your positive feedback. I hope you are aware of the fact that it is not yet a functional WINS server. It still needs lots of development before it can enter beta state. I haven't had much time recently to work on it. If you know how to code in C, I'd love to get somebody on board to help me finish it."

Thanks,
Thomas

myside | 06/19/2011, 13:06 [Reply]

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Main Entry:   spew   Pronunciation:   \ˈspyü\
Function: verb
Etymology: Middle English, from Old English spīwan; akin to Old High German spIwan to spit, Latin spuere, Greek ptyein   First Known Use: before 12th century

intransitive verb
  1. VOMIT
  2. to come forth in a flood or gush
  3. to ooze out as if under pressure : EXUDE
transitive verb
  1. VOMIT
  2. to send or cast forth with vigor or violence or in great quantity <a volcano spewing out ash> —often used with out —spew·er noun
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