determining domain master and forcing elections?

[Erik Corry]

Jeff Wiegley <jeff at la.usweb.com> wrote:
> Every now and then one of my lusers sets up a machine which attempts
> to be a local master and/or a domain master for our workgroup. This
> sucks since we want our samba machine to *always* be the WINS master
> server.  (we have os level set to 255 for this machine) but appearantly
> it still loses elections that come up from time to time.
> 
> The only way I know when this happens is when people come to me complaining
> about not being able to see all the servers and the only way I know how
> to correct the problem is to find the offensive computer, disable it
> somehow and then stop and start the smb services on teh samba machine.
> 
> My two questions are:
> 
> 1) Is there a command/procedure I can use to determine who is currently
> the domain master browser. and...

smbclient -L localhost tells you this.

Are you using the "WORKGROUP" workgroup? In my experience
that is a mistake, because it means you are in the same
workgroup as a lot of unconfigured machines, some of which
will try to become master browser.

> 2) Is there a way I can cause a running smbd/nmbd to force a new election
> without having to completely stop and then restart the whole thing?

You only need to restart nmbd, not smbd.

-- 
Erik Corry