One of two samba servers not visible (remote announce problem?)

[Frank R. Brown]

I have a partial solution to my problem:

The problem was that the samba server on the all-unix
subnet (A) was not visible to browsing (although it
accepted connections just fine), while the samba server
on the mixed subnet (B) showed up in the browse lisr
as expected.

I tried various 'remote announce' configurations (to subnet
C, to C's wins server , and to C's wins server's subnet),
without luck.

Then I was playing around with 'nmblookup' and saw samba
server A as the only browser on subnet A (no surprise).  I
saw three browsers on subnet B --- one of which was samba
server B!  (None appeared to be wins servers.)  So just as a casual
experiment, I set server A's 'remote announce' to point directly to
server B's ip address.

This seems to work perfectly.  Now server A shows up in the
browse list, including the list as seen from subnet C.

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.

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.

Could someone clue me it to what is going on here?  Thanks.

I wrote:

> I have (more than) three subnets:
> 
> A:  all unix (I think)
> B:  mixed unix and PC's
> C:  all PC's (I think)
> 
> I have a samba server on both A and B.  They have
> essentially identical configurations.  Both are running
> the nmbd daemon, and are configured as
> workgroup = XXSAMBA...

     Frank R.Brown
     Frank.R.Brown at MailAndNews