Multiple simultaneous connections - failing :-(

[David L. Parsley]

Hi Gents,

	I have installed a PPro200 w/ 64 MB running 2.0.30 + Samba
1.9.17p1 (not vulnerable to security hole) and have about 48 clients in a
school laboratory situation.  I may have as many as 20 clients come up
simultaneously.  As of yesterday, I've had problems with small groups (or
whole ROOMS!) coming up and reporting '... \\bserve\whatever ... the
computer name could not be found ... (yada yada yada)'.
	Day One of 'the problem' was the stressed out day from hell, and
nothing I tried worked. I'll grant that, with classes meeting all day, I
only had a few hours of quality time with the lab.  (By rebooting a small
group of machines at a time, it worked) 
	This morning, on a hunch, I reniced nmbd to -10, turned a lab off
and back on a few moments later, and ALL the machines came up and
connected (which, at this point, was nothing short of a miracle).  Since
class started in 5 minutes, I quit while I was ahead.  Now, I reallize
that 'one data point does not an experiment make' - but I thought I would
check to see if anyone might have seen something like this, or had to take
similar measures, or whether this made a bit of sense to anybody?!?
	I'll be monitoring this, and reading the f'n manuals, untill
resolved... any feedback or troubleshooting suggestions or pointers to
good reading material would be appreciated.  Now, I'll try to give you all
the other salient points:

- All the clients are Win311, using the samba server for WINS

- The browsing-related portions of the smb.conf:
	wins support = yes
	os level = 65
	preferred master = yes
	local master = yes

- The network interface is aliased; eth0 is a valid Internet address,
eth0:0 is on the local, 'non-connected' subnet with the other machines.
IP-masquerading is turned on to give the labs internet access (at
teacher discretion via firewalling rules).  Eventually, I would like to
install a transparent proxy-cache on this machine (IF I can get stable
file & print sharing working).


A note to the developers:  THANKS!!! Prior to this problem, the business
dept. was THRILLED with the performance in these labs!  Printing to HP
jetdirect's seems to work real well, though I had to upgrade the firmware
to the latest revision because previously the HP couldn't handle multiple
print jobs in a single TCP connection.

If anybody would like more info, feel free to e-me; but I think
this is already long enough!  

Later...

--
David L. Parsley	 		Those who do not understand Unix
Miracle worker & Linux Man		are condemned to reinvent it,
City of Salem Schools			poorly.          (H. Spencer)