Am I trying the wrong things?

[Keith G. Murphy]

David Dyer-Bennet wrote:
> 
> I'm having some small trouble getting my local lan running the way I
> want.  I have two samba servers, Windows 95, 98, and NT Workstation
> systems on it (which are also doing some peer-to-peer sharing).  It's
> all one IP net; there's an ethernet switch in the middle, and a couple
> of peripheral hubs each connected to that switch.  Note that I do NOT
> have an NT Server system; I'm not running domain security.
> 
> I've tried a million things, and most of them have sort of worked one
> way or another.  None of them has worked all the time for everything
> yet.  (Generally some systems can't browse to other systems; which
> ones varies.  Sometimes access control doesn't work either.)
> 
> I think it's very likely, by now, that I have my configurations so
> hacked around on various systems that I need a really clear plan, and
> need to go carefully reset everything to match this plan and start
> over.

I can comment on what's worked for me.  Not saying there aren't
other/better ways.
> 
> So I want advice about what this clear plan should be.  Should I try
> to force one of the samba servers to be the master browser?

Yes:

    domain master = yes
    local master = yes
    preferred master = yes


> Should I
> run one of them as a WINS server?

Yes:

wins support = yes

>  Should I enable DNS  in the tcp/ip
> properties on the windows boxes?

Not necessary for Samba.


> Should I enable WINS in the tcp/ip
> properties on the windows boxes?  

You *should* not have to do this unless you have remote (such as dialin)
users that need to see machines in your workgroup.  But sometimes WINS
confuses me...

> What samba security level?  And so
> forth; there seem to be about a million decisions to make, and it's
> not very clear to me what the consequences of each choice are.
> 
I use 'security = user' and 'map to guest = Bad User'.  I just didn't
want to get into all the NT domain shit for the simple stuff we're
doing.

Hope that helps.