Multiple simultaneous connections failing

[David L. Parsley]

Hi,
	I've installed Linux 2.0.30 (Debian 1.3.1) on a PPro200 w/ 64 MB
of RAM, running Samba 1.9.17p1.  It's serving about 48 Win311 clients in
two high-school labs.  These machines are running M$ TCP/IP32b.  Security
is set to share, and the windows login has no password, so the machines
just boot up, reconnect to resources, and go on.  Up untill Monday, things
were going great - performance under load was awesome, and printing to HP
Jetdirects worked real well (after upgrading their firmware).  Then
Monday, I suddenly had this problem: when I turn on the power for the lab,
all the machines (or a varying large portion of them) boot up with an
error box reporting '... \\bserve\whatever ... the machine name could not
be located on the network'.  Re-booting in small groups seems to work.
	Any clues as to what might cause (or alleviate) this?  Last week,
I didn't notice anything like this, and for the life of me, I can't think
of anything that could have changed over the weekend.  Of course, this lab
is on a network segment with the rest of the highschool, which has two old
Netware servers, and an ISDN bridge connects us to a nearby college (and
the internet) - so we get all of their broadcast traffic, too.
	Any pointers to possibly relevent reading materials, or diagnostic
experiments, would be appreciated...
	Also possibly of interest:  only the Linux box has a valid
internet IP addr, the lab is in an unconnected range with the Linux box
masquerading for them (WHEN they're surfing, which isn't all that often).
This is accomplished by aliasing the ethernet interface of the Linux box
and giving it both a valid IP and one in the non-connected range.

	I'll be happy to supply any other relevant info to anyone curious,
but this is already long enough...

TIA.
--
David L. Parsley	 		Those who do not understand Unix
Miracle worker & Linux Man		are condemned to reinvent it,
City of Salem Schools			poorly.          (H. Spencer)