SAMBA requesting to be a master browser....

[Stephen L Arnold]

When the world was young, George Gallen <ggallen at slackinc.com> 
carved some runes like this:  

> We are running samba 1.9.16p11, and seem to be doing
> just fine.
> 
> Last Month, our IT dept informed us that our machine
> was attempting to be a master browser, which the NT
> Wins server was not happy about. Below is my global
> config options. 
> 
> When I killed/restarted the samba daemons (running as
> daemons and not via inetd) the problem seem to vanish.
> Feeling this was a fluke, it was dismissed.
> 
> Apparantly it happened again, last week, so I'm wondering....
> 
> The network is totally W95/98/NT, with the exception of
> our unix system. Is there some way that samba can be made
> to kick into a master browser mode, even though the config
> file has "no" for preferred master?

First, I would recommend using 1.9.18p8 or p10.  Second, what are 
you other browse settings?  If you don't want samba to be the 
master browser *ever*, then you should try the following:

local master = no
domain master = no
preferred master = no
OS level = 0

You don't need to use TCPdump to sniff packets; just up the debug 
level on samba (nmbd actually) and you'll see the log files fill 
with interesting messages about browse master, etc.  Also, running

smbclient -L hostname

will show a browse list if that host has one.  There should also be 
a way to use nmblookup to find the current browse master.

Hope this helps, Steve


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Stephen L Arnold                      http://www.rain.org/~sarnold
#include <std_disclaimer.h>
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