samba blamed for network problems (help!)

[Stephen L Arnold]

Howdy folks:

Hi. It's me again. I've posted before about browsing problems, etc.

Here's the setup:

An isolated LAN (most clients have modems for dialling out) with 
one linux/samba machine (RedHat 4.2, kernel 2.0.30, samba 1.9.18p8) 
and ~20 win95 (OSR/2.1) clients.  We used to have Netware 4.11 
until the new PC/lan guy decided we didn't it any more (our old 
server now runs win95 -ugh).  The clients now run TCP/IP only.  
Some still have the (now useless) IPX/SPX stack loaded (just a 
leftover from our Netware days).

We've been having intermittent network problems with browsing on 
the win95 clients.  Every few days (or week or two) the browse list 
disappears (but the Net Use commands still work).  I can use 
smbclient from the linux box to see/attach-to shares on all windoze 
clients, but the windoze clients can't see each other.  I have 
samba set as the domain & local masters, etc (still can't get WINS 
to work though).  I'm also running apache and a few other things on 
the linux box, but that shouldn't cause any problems (I think).

The real kicker is, I know samba (at least I'm pretty sure) isn't 
the cause, but yesterday (when I wasn't here) the PC-LAN guy 
disconnected my linux box from the network, claiming to have 
"cured" our problem.  We may be pushing the length limit on a coax 
ethernet (we inherited the cabling when we moved into this part of 
the building) but I have no network analysis hardware (or much 
experience, but neither does the PC/LAN guy).

Anybody got any ideas?  What kinds of linux tools are there to 
track down the cause of this problem?  Could it be samba?

Any help would be greatly appreciated (I'd let that weenie blame it 
on linux/samba and get away with it).

Thanks in advance, Steve Arnold


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Stephen L. Arnold                        Senior Systems Engineer
ENSCO Inc.                        email:  arnold.steve at ensco.com
P.O. Box 5488                         www:  http://www.ensco.com
Vandenberg AFB, CA  93437             voice: 805.734.8232 x68838
                                               fax: 805.734.4779
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