Disappearing clients in WINS list

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Mon, 20 Oct 1997, Dieter Rothacker wrote:

> 2) I will try that.
> 3) No problem. The machine which acts as WINS server has no shares, and
>    is only used for maintaining a cross-subnet browse list and TCP/IP &
>    IPX router. It will soon become a full firewall, and therefor will do
>    no file serving.
>    The samba box that disappeared is a 64MB ftp/nfs/samba without an X
>    server, so that should be also enough.
> 
> I believe that the problem is one of the W95 clients (of course :-)),
> but I wonder why samba does not re-register at the WINS server ?

do you have "preferred master = yes" in the smb.conf file?  if the w95 
machine is being agressive, it will win the election, and samba will say 
"ok.  you win!".

you need "preferred master = yes" to a) give samba an edge in elections 
b) to get it to retry every 5 minutes if it doesn't become the local master.

> Here is the smb.conf of the disappeared samba box:
> (I stripped the services part, I think it is not important)

>    wins support = no                                                     
>    workgroup =
> WORKGROUP                                                   

make sure this is on the same line.

>    browse list = no                                                      
>    domain master = no                         
>    preferred master = no                      

here you go! set this to yes!

>    local master = no                          

and this!

>    os level = 0            

this puts your samba server on a par with Windows for Workgroups 
machines: _low_ priority.

check the Browsing.txt file etc (grep for "os level" in docs directory).

put this to at least 4 (one above NT Workstation).

luke