AW: Useful registry keys.

Kuppinger - Martin Kuppinger martin at kuppinger.com
Thu Apr 8 08:11:20 GMT 1999


someone mentioned turning off the lmb parameter in NT, so I dug out the
key to do it and ran across another useful key.

Hope these help.  ;)

For making NT so it won't become the lmb:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Browser\Parameters
  IsDomainMaster: FALSE
  MaintainServerList: No
[>]  IsDomainMaster is FALSE by default. But the parameter itself doesn't determine, that the system can't be elected as master browser. It's only important when there are several systems with the same election criteria.
MaintainServerList ist AUTO by default on NT Workstations and Server, YES by default on NT domain controllers. It has to be set on each NT System in the network (system policy would be the best choice to do that).

But if you change these values, you have to be aware that you need browser servers in the network. If you have only one samba server, this server will have to do all the work. NT normally works with 2 browser servers (one master, one backup) up to 31 systems with server service running. For every 32 additional systems there will be one more browser server.

The role of the browser servers is controlled by an election criterium (4 Byte):
First Byte: Operating System (With NT Server set to 0x20, NT WS 0x10)
Byte 2+3: Election version (changes with internal versions of browser service, not NT version)
Byte 4: version criteria. PDC wins if Byte 1-3 are equal, then WINS and so on. MaintainServerList isn't very important

[>]  If you look at these criterias, the easiest way to ensure that a samba server will be master browser is to set the OS-Version of the Server higher then 0x20. For the samba developers that means that you should make this configurable - than the admin could determine if samba is definitely master browser or not.

Don't play to much with the parameters mentioned above. IsDomainMaster could be useful - but you have to ensure that there are enough browser servers. Otherwise there could be a lot of election traffic and so on by design (If you should use the word "design" for something such obscure as the browser service)

One additional point: If you work with several IP subnets, there is an Domain Master Browser in addition to the master browsers of the local subnets. This Domain Master Browser is always (!) the PDC.


I believe this one turns off the slow link connection:
---> CUT HERE <---
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon]
"SlowLinkDetectEnabled"=dword:00000000

---> END CUT <---

[>]  It turns off the message displayed. There is another parameter
SlowLinkTimeOut
which you could use to set the time in milliseconds. Default is 2000, maximum in system policy is 20000, in registry i've read about 120.000


[>]  Martin Kuppinger
martin at kuppinger.com 



More information about the samba-ntdom mailing list