"remote announce": system broadcast addresses can't differ still?

[Peter Samuelson]

[Burt <jameson at monumental.com>]
> We have 4 class C networks,
>    199.129.206.*
>    199.129.207.*
>    199.129.208.*
>    199.129.209.*
[etc]

Your problem is a little confusing.  You say you have four 24-bit
(class C) networks -- are these routed to each other, or are they one
physical LAN?  I'll assume the latter.

Possibly what is happening is that the Windows computers in (for
example) .206.* do not have routes set up to communicate with .207.*
etc.  If this is the case, `ping' will probably fail from the Windows
host to the Unix host.

The simplest solution to *that* may be to configure your Unix host with
multiple IP aliases, one in each subnet.  This is typically not all
that hard to do.

Another possibility is that the incorrect broadcast addresses are
causing the Windows hosts not to pick up broadcast messages.  This is a
can of worms you really want to avoid.  If you "do not have permission"
to change the erroneous broadcast addresses, you should bug whoever
*does* have permission.  I have seen many communication problems go
away by fixing subnet and broadcast numbers.

To avoid the broadcast issue entirely, you can switch to WINS for name
resolution.  It sounds scary because with NT you have to set up a whole 
new service, but with Samba it's really easy: just use the smb.conf
parameter "wins support = yes" and tell your Windows boxes where to
find the WINS server, in their TCP/IP setup.  Note: some versions of
Windows have a bug where the WINS client won't work unless you have
both IP address fields filled in.  In this case set them both to the
same IP number.

WINS does not solve all browsing or lookup issues, but it sure solves a
lot of them.

Peter