network inaccessible

[Russell A. Bell]

	When the ISP goes down Windoze computers cannot map drives on
the local SambaServer.  Windoze reports the network as busy and
inacessible.  Non-SMB connections (e.g., telnet, ftp, ping) work; an
instance of smbd -D appears on the process list for each machine
attached; drives already mapped still work.  log.MachineNames report
read_data errors when this happens.  Only asyncdns.c, a piece of
nmbd's source, makes this call, and it uses it for DNS queries.  So I
suspect that nmbd tries to call the external DNS at drive-mapping
time, can't get through, and Windoze times out before nmbd gives up on
the DNS query.  I don't see why this happens: why does SambaServer
call an external DNS server?  We don't have 'dns proxy', 'wins
server', or 'wins support' on.  If I use 'name resolve order =
lmhosts, hosts', ommitting 'bcast' and 'wins', will nmbd not make an
external DNS request?  Since lmhosts should resolve all requests and
we use the default name resolve order now, I would have thought it
would make no difference.  But perhaps some implicit external request
happens that I have missed.

russell bell