Proposal: Good Neighbor Policy

[Jeremy Allison]

"John E. Malmberg" wrote:
> 
> An incident recently happened at a division of a large multinational company
> that I know of where the network was severely disrupted.  It was traced to
> SAMBA running on a commercial UNIX box.
> 
> The network archictect for that collection of the divisions now wants to
> totally ban SAMBA in that corporation as a result.
> 
> The problem was caused by SAMBA (unknown version) getting into a browser
> election war with the NT Domain controller.  It was jamming quite a few
> CLASS C networks.


But you can do this with a misconfigured NT server also.

> It appears that there is some incompatabilities between the browser protocol
> that NT uses and the protocol that Microsoft documents.

Well, we work on the protocol we see on the wire, not in the
docs :-). Seriously, we are not incompatible with the MS
browsing protocol, you just have to know how browsing works
in order to set up a working network. But that's the same
even in an MS-only environment.

> Based on these experiences, I always recommend that anyone adding SAMBA to
> an NT domain, not allow the SAMBA box to take part in browser elections.

I think that's an overgeneralization. Samba can have
its place as a tool in browsing (and can do some things
NT can't, and vica-versa of course). SGI use Samba in
browsing successfully on a very large network.

Sorry for the late reply, still catching up on
email whilst I was in Japan.

Regards,

	Jeremy Allison,
	Samba Team.

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