Anyone else seen this?

[Jason Gerrity]

Hello All,

I was just wondering if anyone else is seeing these problems...

Every so often our Win95 clients can not authenticate.  They get the error:

"The network could not validate your username.  You cannot use Windows
unless your username is validated by the network.  Make sure you typed
everything corectly, or contact your administrator."

(which is due to our policy file setting of not allowing access if not
authenticated)

Or the machine will seem to hang for 30 sec to a minute and then go to a
local login prompt and hitting escape or cancel will bring the user to a
default desktop.

These interruptions in authentication last for a random amount of time
5,10,15,etc mins.  Nothing is done on the server end and they will suddenly
be able to login again.

During this time, users who are currently logged in work ok.  We can ping
the login servers and the homedir servers (we're using the NIS auto.map
features to have our homedirs on different servers)  The log files don't
show any connections from the clients during this time (except the ones
already logged in). DHCP works during this (if we get to a default desktop
then winipcfg /renew all works)

we have done some packet tracing and tcpdumps and it appears that the
client requests are seen by the server but Samba is not responding to them...

This is becoming VERY annoying and we're running out of ideas.

Our system is:

2 Dec Alphas 3.2g (same subnet- each with multiple interfaces) - 1 home dir
1 login/file server
~150 Pentium clients running win95 (OSR2)
Samba 17p4

We are also experiencing a problem with our printers (qms 1725) with print
ques on the servers going "off-line" as reported by Win95 and jobs not
being printed.  If the user logs back in (if the authentication problem
doesn't stop them) then a message appears saying they have jobs in the que
and to print or delete them...selecting print will print the jobs.

If you try to remove all printers in Win95 then add a new one, you get the
error that the printer is off-line.  This too is a random problem that will
go away.

Again, any and all help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Jason