Samba election incompatibilites? (MS KB article Q168821)

[Andrew Pimlott]

On Sun, Dec 31, 2000 at 09:21:36AM -0700, Calvin Dodge wrote:
> Andrew Pimlott wrote:
> > 
> > because it had refused to give up "master browser" status (having
> > obtained it during a reboot of an NT machine).  The global part of
> [snip]
> >         os level = 20
> 
> I believe the above line is the problem.  When the NT machine went
> down, the Windows systems held an "election", and the Samba server
> won it (it stacked the deck in its favor with that os level).

According to http://home.germany.net/101-69082/samba.html#4.5.1 ,
this is higher than NT Workstation but still lower than NT Server.
I do not know whether there is an NT Server on my subnet, but there
is obviously one somewhere on our network, trying to coordinate
things.  There must be some way for samba to detect that it is not
supposed to take over as local browse master in this environment.
After all, the NT Workstations apparently do.  I wish I had more
evidence, but I am convinced that what you say is not the whole
story.

Ok, after reading BROWSING.txt again more carefully (in particular,
the paragraph starting "Now examine subnet 2"), I think the problem
is that my samba machine didn't have a WINS server configured, so it
didn't know where to look for the domain master browser, and as a
result remained a local master with an incomplete browse list.  Does
this make sense?  Is there a way the samba machine could have
detected the situation and ceded local master status?  Also, I
gather that Windows machines get the WINS server via DHCP; has
anyone looked into modifying the free dhcp clients to get this
information and pass it to samba?

As it stands, "local master = yes" and "os level = 20" seem to be
dangerous defaults.  I would suggest turning off "local master".
Many (most?) people just want to share their files, without
interfering with the workings of their network more than necessary.

Also, there is a bug in the documentation:  The text says that the
default "os level" is zero, but the "Default:" at the end says 20
(the latter is accurate).  Was the default changed at one point?

I will try to find out more about our network and exactly why the
problem happened, though I'm not sure our network guys will know
enough details.

> I'd suggest you change the os level to 0, restart Samba, then see if it gets
> elected when the NT system goes down.

For now, I will probably do this and set "local master" to no, to be
on the safe side.

Thanks,
Andrew