"unbecome lmb" oddity

David Collier-Brown - Sun Canada davecb at scot.canada.sun.com
Wed Mar 29 13:33:41 GMT 2000


Duncan wrote:
| > an NT box on the LAN appears to force an election about
| > once a day.  the samba server loses this election, as
| > office politics dictate that it should, but then something
| > breaks.  the LAN becomes unbrowseable.  

Herb Lewis replied
| If you have a microsoft machine on the same subnet that is a PDC for
| this domain this is exactly the behavior I would expect to see. MS
| wants their machines to be everything. If it wins as domain master
| browser it will want to be local master as well. The other case that
| can cause this is a microsoft machine running multiple protocols 
| (TCP/IP, netBEUI, IPX/SPX). Samba only listens on TCP/IP so it cannot
| participate in elections on other stacks. Again the microsoft philosophy
| of being everything comes into play again. It the machine wins on
| one protocol it will announce itself as the master on all protocols.
| Samba see this announcement and since it had previously won, it
| demotes itself and forces another election (per the protocol).

	Which leaves clients not using TCP/IP instead of
	NetBLOOIE unable to see the browse master, as Duncan
	noticed.
	
	Samba appears to be doing the right thing, but NT ends up
	denying services to Samba's customers... not something we want!
	
	I'd actually have expected the NT machine to see the "please elect
	a master" request on TCP/IP and hold an election there, win it,
	and (continue to!) provide browsing services on that protocol.
	
	Any gurus have an idea why NT ends up on NetBEUI?  Would it be
	the default protocol, perhaps?  And if so, why did it ever provide
	browsing on TCP/IP?
	
	We might need to compare NT's initial election at boot time with
	this later one, to see what's different...


Duncan,	can playing with the "preferred" bits or the os level result
in NT winning on TCP and staying there? And do you have the logs from
previous elections which NT won non-destrutively?


--dave	
--
David Collier-Brown in Boston
Phone: (781) 442-0734, Room BUR03-3632



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