One of two samba servers not visible (remote announce

[Stephen L Arnold]

When the world was young, "Frank R. Brown" 
<list.Frank at MailAndNews.com> carved some runes like this:  

[snip]
> I have two concerns:
> 
> The first is that I don't understand what is going on, so I'm worried that
> this setup will turn out to be flaky.

The only thing flaky in this setup are the various incarnations of 
windoze...  See below.

> Secondly, I didn't expect to see samba become a browser on the
> mixed network.  I would have thought it would invariably lose
> elections to the native nt boxes.  Therefore my concern is that
> it won't usually be a browser, so my 'remote announce' directly
> to it won't do any good.

Samba will compete for browse master based on the "OS level" and 
"preferred master" settings in smb.conf (what else?).  Setting OS 
level to 32 will make samba beat win31/9x machines, while 65 will 
beat NT machines (and preferred master = yes will give samba a 
slight edge in winning when OS levels are equal).  Windoze boxes 
are setup (by default) to always try and start a browser fight.  
The reason NetHood changes constantly is because win boxes are 
constantly going up and down so the browse list is not only 
changing, but it's also owned by different machines throughout the 
day.  Recommended setup:

If you want your browse master to be the same machine all the time 
(and linux/samba is a good choice because it runs forever), then 
set samba's OS level to 65, set preferred master = yes, and disable 
the windoze clients from competing for browse master stuff.

Network Properties -> File & Print Sharing Properties -> Browse 
Master -> Disable

As a backup, you can have another box in that workgroup (either 
winNT, win9x, samba) set to be a browse master (a box that should 
be running most or all of the time).  With the above samba 
settings, your main samba box will always win the master browser 
election (unless it's down).  You can use smbclient/nmblookup to 
find the browse master, view the browse list, etc.

Don't forget, you only need one domain master, but each subnet 
(workgroup, whatever) has its own local master.

Have fun, Steve

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Stephen L Arnold                      http://www.rain.org/~sarnold
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