SAMBA 2.0 and SP5

[Al Margolis]

FYI for people working on this problem:

I have a very similar situation at one of my client's networks and recently 
solved it with this same LMHOSTS solution.  The kicker is that in my case 
that all the domain controllers are real M$ NT Servers.  We have been 
making lots of changes to our network so I am not yet certain what caused 
the problem, but my best guess is that it started when we went to multiple 
WINS servers.

This does not seem to be much of a problem for computers that have been up 
and running for a while (generally NT Workstation SP3) but we were unable 
to add new computers to the network (generally NT Workstation SP4) due to 
the "could not locate domain controller" preventing us from joining the 
domain.  We have had some reports of people having this kind of problem 
after coming back from vacation, but I haven't been able to confirm that -- 
this could imply some kind of WINS reservation expiration problem.

I have only limited access to this network, but would be willing to do 
whatever testing / reporting I can if it will help SAMBA PDC development.

Al Margolis       al at sfex.com
The Software Engineering Store
650-952-7672       FAX: -7629


-----Original Message-----
From: Dave.Stevenson at durham.ac.uk [mailto:Dave.Stevenson at durham.ac.uk]
Sent: Monday, October 11, 1999 3:14 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list SAMBA-NTDOM
Subject: Re: SAMBA 2.0 and SP5


Some progress

Recap:
 2.1pre-alpha 10-9-99 NT4 clients SP3,4,5

 Symptoms:

 Roaming profiles becoming "corrupted" ( eg Desktop settings, program 
settings going astray)
 or "Using cached profile" type messages

 "Could not locate domain controller for domain XXXXX" (XXXX=local domain, 
single subnet) so
 logins failing.

 I am running WINS, I did not use local LMHOSTS files

 It seems putting an entry in client LMHOSTS file for the PDC works a 
little wonder

 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx  mypdchost  #PRE #DOM:mydomain
 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx  "mypdchost      \0x1b"  #PRE   (carefull with the spaces 
15chars+\0x1b)

 seems to improve the situation considerably. No longer get the "could not 
locate domain controller"
 messages, though it is early days to say that the problem has definitely 
worked around.

 My Samba PDC= my WINS server = logon server  so it takes quite a hit at 
logon.

 My guess (and it is only a guess) is that the name resolution request( 
h-node type?) (for the PDC?)
at logon was timing out. I thought that the fallback was to broadcast, 
which should have been
OK (all on same subnet).

If I've got #PREloaded LMHOSTS entries anyone know if WINS is still called 
first for those entries?
(would seem unnessary) Is not clear to me from Resource Kit book.

Also, "Using cached profile" has disappeared on the machines I changed to 
have LMHOSTS
though this was rather intermittant so needs watching for longer.