House of the Rising Samba Sun (or Don't Do What I Have Done)

[rparker at VPR.net]

Errgh, what a long day - just hope someone can benefit (and be
forwarned) by my error.

I have been putting all my hosts behind a firewall (linux
RH6.2/ipchains) so they could talk to a Win2K box and not have
it exposed too much ;) Also, I moved to a new ISP and this
seemed just the dandy way to not have to re-ip all the machines
on the same day as the switch over.

So, in testing the setup I have been working from my workstation behind
the wall and this weekend I made the major switch to a new
ISP. The benefit is that almost all my local clients were now behind a
172.x.x.x network so I only had to change a couple of outside
machines. Couldn't browse from behind the firewall, but I
thought 'well, the clients can connect, I can map the drives so
I'll deal with it later'.

Great so far. The ISP switch goes off reasonably well. 
Now, I wanted to test some printing, etc. so I
change the IP on my machine, hook up to the hub outside the
firewall (where my samba server is). No big deal, I reboot and
ssh into my unix box, look over the printers, etc. test them
from lpr and so forth and everything is fine.

Ok, so I notice I'm not connected to my shares anymore. And I
CAN'T connect to them from my box. So, of course I look at
everything, cables, network properties, delete old .pwl files
(since I had been logging into the NT domain earlier from
behind the firewall I thought that might be a culprit, etc.) I
dutifully go through all the steps in diagnosis.txt and of
course everything works until I get to my client
machine....arrgh. OF COURSE, IT'S ONLY A PROBLEM on MY MACHINE!
(the other clients outside the firewall are just fine thanks...)
Oddly, I can 'see' the drives I used to have mapped with those lovely
little red x's on them (I suppose the browser remembered that
they USED to be there but it can't open them now..)

So, I wish I could say which of these made the difference, but
I finally said to myself, 'self, maybe you should turn the
bloody thing off, let it stew for a while and turn it back on'
and THEN I also remembered that I had long before put in an entry
for the samba server (when I was testing cross subnet browsing)
in an LMHOSTS file on my client machine. OF COURSE, that
LMHOSTS file had the samba server at the OLD IP NUMBER
(remember, I changed everything this weekend).

So, I removed that, and shut down, powered down and when
everything came back up, VOILA! I could see my shares and everything
is just fine (except it's dark, I'm tired and starting to
notice I'm really hungry...).

So, hard to say what the culprit was but chalk it up to simple
things being the biggest traps (and time wasters). I vote
heavily for the misconfigured LMHOSTS entry, but at this point
I'm not feeling any too clever.

Anyway, may this be a lesson to someone (hopefully)

cheers,

Rich Parker
Director of Engineering
Vermont Public Radio