Very strange WINS/browsing behavior

Cole, Timothy D. timothy_d_cole at md.northgrum.com
Wed Jul 21 21:15:02 GMT 1999


Ever since we moved our production Samba machines to their own workgroup
(SAMBA) from an NT domain (R78MDA, of which they were not full members),
browsing with the Samba machines seems to have gotten rather funky; the main
symptom is that the SAMBA workgroup, while it does show up in Network
neighborhood, cannot be browsed.

I've spent quite a bit of time poring over the WINS records, and the Samba
machines are registering correctly.

Here's the situation:

We're on quite a few different routed subnets.

The WINS server (one of several, but it's (I think) the only one that
matters here -- it's the one the Samba servers query, and primary WINS for
my desktop machine), SR78MDA00, resides at x.x.c.13.  It's the DMB for the
R78MDA domain.

My own HP-UX box, UGW003, is the DMB for the new SAMBA workgroup.  It
resides at x.x.b.78

After an attempt at browsing the Samba workgroup from my desktop machine
(x.x.a.77), here's what the output of "nbtstat -c" looks like (slightly
edited, of course):

Node IpAddress: [x.x.a.77] Scope Id: []

              NetBIOS Remote Cache Name Table

    Name              Type       Host Address    Life [sec]
------------------------------------------------------------
SAMBA          <1B>  UNIQUE      x.x.b.78       660
SR78MDA00      <03>  UNIQUE      x.x.c.13       -1
SR78MDA00      <00>  UNIQUE      x.x.c.13       -1
SR78MDA00      <20>  UNIQUE      x.x.c.13       -1
R78MDA         <1B>  UNIQUE      x.x.c.13       660
UGW003         <00>  UNIQUE      x.x.c.13       120
UGW003         <20>  UNIQUE      x.x.b.78       600

Note UGW003<00> -- this is not what is in WINS.

Where is this bogus value coming from?

This has been a persistent problem, spanning many months, and quite a number
of reboots for all machines involved.  It has been consistent with versions
of Samba ranging from 1.9.x to 2.0.4b.  I have absolutely no idea what the
problem is.  Nor do the local NT networking gurus.

Unfortunately, being unable to enumerate the machines in the workgroup makes
browsing Samba shares in Explorer quite difficult -- Explorer insists on
enumerating the siblings of the server you're browsing in the tree view,
hangs, and then unceremoniously kicks you out to the top level ("My
Computer") as soon as it decides it can't enumerate them.  At least most of
the users normally just map drives (avoiding the Explorer problem), but they
still can't browse the workgroup.

Has anyone seen anything similar?  More importantly, has anyone been able to
fix it?



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