browser problem

[Duncan Kinnear]

On 26 Oct 1998 at 16:11, Peter Stoddard wrote:

> My hypothesis is that these NT clients are participating in master browser
> elections, and they are winning the elections, becoming the master browser
> and then cannot actually perform the duties of master browser.  Based on
> this hypothesis I have tried to skew the elections in favor of the unix
> boxes with higher OS levels and by enabling preferred master on one of
> them.  It doesn*t seem to be working. 

We found that we had to disable the browser on all the NT machines (6 
in our case) to stop them trying to win elections.  I found an article in 
the NT FAQ (www.ntfaq.com) which gave the Registry entries to change.

To set a machine as a "Non-browser" edit the key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Browser
\Parameters\MaintainServerList

and change it to "No".  Also, in Control Panel, Services, change the 
"startup" behaviour of the "Computer Browser" service to "disabled".

Reboot the machine so that these changes can take effect.

Once you do that to *EVERY* NT machine, you shouldn't have any 
more elections.

By the way, you could create a '.reg' file similar to the 
"NT4_PlainPassword.reg" file that comes with Samba.  It would 
probably save you a bit of time going around your 80 machines.

On a similar note, I have a browsing problem that is a little different.  
This may have been answered before, but I couldn't find anything in the 
Browsing.txt or the FAQ.

We have set up a dial-in system using the RAS server on our NT server. 
The NT server has browsing disabled as above.  When we connect to 
the dial-in server, we can't see anything in NN, but we can map drives 
by explicitly defining the UNC path to the Samba server.  Machines on 
the LAN have no problem browsing.  Any ideas?  Something odd (which 
may be a red herring) is that when we map the drives using the UNC 
path, it must be UPPERCASE to work properly!  The LAN machines 
can use either case when mapping.

Any help would be appreciated.


Cheers,

Duncan Kinnear,
McCarthy and Associates,			Email:  duncan at McCarthy.co.nz
PO Box 764, McLean Towers,			Phone:  +64 6 834 3360
Shakespeare Road, Napier, New Zealand.		Fax:    +64 6 834 3369
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