samba blamed for network problems (help!)

[Langsteiner Martin ZFF IE-F]

Hi!

On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Stephen L Arnold wrote:
<...snip>
>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).
<snap...>

Network debugging is a real hair raiser o-:E    Here are two vague hints:

1) I once setup our Samba server (Linux 2.0.33, Samba 1.9.18p10, ! WinNT
domain !) as 
'local master = yes', 'preferred master = yes'
It managed to become the local master browser for our workgroup, but somehow
this seemed to be ignored by the WinXXX machines. From time to time, there
was a fight on the net between Samba and some WFWG or WinNT machine
('sending election packet....won election on workgroup ...'). See logfile
/usr/local/samba/var/log.nmb. We then had to set our Samba server to 
'local master = no', 'preferred master = no', and, of course, 'domain master
= no'.

2) Newer PC Ethernet adapters may be switched to 'full duplex mode'. In this
case, older network adapters might have to wait a  _long_ time for their
turn. (I have to admit, this happened to us in a LAN where NT machines
should coexist with Digital Equipment PDP computers...) This problem was
solved by putting the PDP's into a separate network, guarded by a switch
that kept out any NT network traffic.

BTW, is the NetBEUI stack loaded on the WinXX clients?

good luck,
Martin