server not visible anymore

[Stephen L Arnold]

On 5 Jul 99, rob at network.de had questions about server not visible 
anymore:  

> I used samba 1.9.x before and everything was fine. The samba 
> server lived in some local network and I could see it from my NTbox 
> as well as from Win95/98 clients.
> 
> I upgraded to version 2.0.3 and now my server is gone though I use 
> the same smb.conf file which is pretty basic. I can connect to it 
> using the "\\server\share" convention and can also see it when I do 
> a "search computer". When the computer is found I can bring up a 
> explorer window in which I can see it and all the shares, printers 
> etc. but strangely enough after about a minute or so the server is 
> not visible anymore. To mount a share automatically at startup 
> does not help either. There is no wins server or domain server in 
> the network.

It sure sounds like it's not getting into the browse list anymore.  
Who's the local master browser in your workgroup?  You can use 
nmblookup to find out.  If it's whichever windoze machine wins at 
any particular time (ie, it's always changing), then they are not 
going to see your samba box unless you have it specified in the 
lmhosts files on the windoze clients.  Or you could have samba act 
as the WINS server and master browser.  That's a much better and 
more stable browsing setup, as linux dosen't go down unless the 
hardware or power fails.  That's the best way to go IMHO.

Steve

************************************************
Steve Arnold  CLE (Certifiable Linux Evangelist)
http://www.rain.org/~sarnold