_real_ browsing problem...

[Jens David -DG1KJD-]

Hi all,

we got a very difficult browsing problem here at the college of German
Telecom at Dieburg. We have been trying to get browsing working at our student
quarters for about three semesters now, re-reading the BROWSING.TXT file for
XX times and spending YY hours analysing nmbd's log files. I hope somebody
can point us to the right direction or tell us where to find more
information about how browsing in our setup is supposed to work.

The physical network setup is the following:
Each level in our building has its own ethernet 10base2 network which the
student's workstations and servers are connected to. The network address is
10.8.100+XX.0/24 where XX is the level. Our building is 18 levels high. These
networks are connected using a single backbone and routers, rendering each
level-network and the backbone network (10.8.1.0/24) an own broadcast domain.
Routing works perfectly, so does the DNS system (linux/bind) and WINS system
(linux/samba).
Our approach was to choose an own workgroup name for each level (H8SXX with
XX being the level #).
As we understand the documentation file BROWSING.TXT each level should have
its local master browser, collecting all host announcements on its broadcast
domain (level network), building a table (so far it works) and syncing its
table with the domain master browser (this doesn't work).
The local master browsers are usually nmbds on linux system, the domain
master browser is a dedicated linux/nmbd on our computer center network
(10.8.2.0/24).

Do we have to use the same workgroup name on each level or really configure
our routers to forward broadcast frames in order to get that stupid browsing
work?

       -- Jens