NT PDC forgets it's the domain master browser! Why???

[Jim Watt]

Synopsis so far...

We have two IP networks in the building.  One of our
NT PDCs is on one network, and is the browse master
for its domain.  Our Samba system is declared in the
same "workgroup" as the NT PDC, and is also our WINS
server.  It's on both networks.

After the PDC has been rebooted, cross-subnet
browsing works fine.  Eventually, the Samba machine
cannot locate the domain master browser, so browse list
synchronization stops happening.

I've tried a number of configuration changes to Samba,
mainly relating to election parameters and declaration
of the missing "1b" entry for the domain in Samba's
lmhosts file.  I then discovered that broadcast lookups
of the <domain>#1b entry worked, but unicast lookups
didn't, even though the <domain>#1b entry was in Samba's
lmhosts file.  I know that rebooting the PDC will make
the browse lists synchronize...for a while.  I was
getting desperate for some other way to at least
convince myself that it was the fact that there was
no "1b" entry in the WINS file for the PDC's domain.

So I decided to put one in last night.

There were nine "1b" entries in wins.dat.  I stopped both
smbd and nmbd, made a new "1b" entry for the missing domain,
and restarted everything.

That worked!  So the question now is why is that one domain's
"1b" record expiring?  It looks like all the others get renewed.
None of them has a TTL of zero, which, according to the code,
is what a non-expiring wins entry's time_t field looks like.

Reminder - it's the PDC for the domain that Samba is declared
to be part of.

I didn't find any special code about the 1b entry anywhere
in the relevant source files for nmbd.  So my surmise is
that the PDC itself isn't sending update records, although
the other nine are.

So why is that? :-)

Jim
-- 
Jim Watt                               jimw at PE-Informatics.COM
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