nmb problems and failing to browse the network

[Andrew Tridgell]

CCd to samba-technical as it may interest some others ...

> I was just trying to debug some browsing problems. I went to have a look at
> log.nmb and found lots of log messages about logon requests, but none of
> them had a time stamp against them, so I could not figure out much about
> what was going on. It would seem that entries in log.nmb should perhaps
> have time stamps on them?

yep, feel free to add them. Use the timestring() function we use in
other parts of the code. 
 
> Anyway I was watching a whole lot of traffic on a ppp interface, and saw
> netbios-ns requests to 172.30.255.255-netbios-ns.  Now, the netmask we use
> is 255.255.192.0, so the broadcast address above is bogus, and is a result
> of a bug in Win 95.
> 
> But what I can't understand is why Win95 was not using WINS.
> 
> In particular, I saw it direct the name lookup requests to a specific host
> first, probably from a WINS address setup for it, and then fall back the
> the broadcast above.

yep, win95 will fallback on broadcasts if the WINS call fails. 

You really do need to get your client machines to use the right
broadcast address. If they don't then a lot more than name lookups can
fail. Elections always happen via broadcasts so you can get really
nasty results if the broadcast is set wrong.
 
> However, when I went to look in the log.nmb file I found nothing of
> interest. What log level do I need to see if it is seeing the name lookup
> requests?

keep raising it till the interesting stuff shows, or look at the code :)

Cheers, Andrew