Proposal: Good Neighbor Policy

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

> I only brought this up as an example of something that did go wrong.  It may
> very well have been a defective setup, and not a real "BUG".
> 
> To return to the basis that started this thread, was the question if
> something can or should be done to prevent a configuration error with SAMBA
> from causing a global networking problem, as that could damage Samba's
> reputation.

keeping a network neighbourhood, regardless of its hosts, is a task of
stupid proportions on a large network.
 
> In this case if there was someway that SAMBA could have detect the
> deadlocked election, and drop out with the appropriate log message, no
> noticable problem would have been seen by the rest of the network.

weelll.. that depends on whether someone configures it with "preferred
master = yes" and also configures _another_ LMB with pm=y as well!!!

under these circumstances, the two will constantly fight it out every
couple of minutes, generating masses of noise.

the thing is that people tend to mess with the configurations not
realising what kind of damage it can do, and there's really not much we
can do about it if people _really_ want to make samba brain-dead.

for example, if they don't specify "wins server = x.x.x.x" and there is
already a PDC on a remote subnet, exactly how are we supposed to detect
the remote PDC (which _has_ registered itself with the wins server, like
the samba box hasn't been)?

the same thing, by the way, applies to NT.  if you don't set it up
properly it can take over a subnet as a PDC and disrupt PDC servivceces on
that subnet.

luke