Samba4wins problem with clients changing IP addresses

William Marshall bmarsh at us.ibm.com
Tue Jun 27 21:53:54 GMT 2006


Last weekend we moved to Samba4wins to replace our Shadow IPServers 
(http://www.shadowsupport.com/) which we have been running for a long 
time.

We have seen problems where users will get the pop-up "duplicate name on 
network" and in some cases this seems to really confuse the workstation or 
redirector code so that it will not allow them to map drives any more.

We think the scenario is something like:

1. ComputerA with IP1 on shuts down or suspends for awhile. Generally we 
saw this on thinkpads that were mobile between subnets.
2. ComputerB comes online and since the DHCP pool is small, takes IP1
3. ComputerA comes back online - maybe from home, maybe on wireless, maybe 
on the same network - but gets IP2
4. ComputerA asks the WINS server for the name ComputerA
5. The WINS server (in wins_challenge_recv in nbt_server/wins/winswack.c ) 
asks IP1 if the name ComputerA is still in use
6. We don't totally understand wins_challenge_recv, but it appears if ANY 
windows client responds at all (like ComputerB) the current mapping is 
kept
7. ComputerA is denied its name and a duplicate name on network error is 
shown

Bill Marshall
Integrated Technology Delivery, Server Operations
Rochester PC Server Team


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