internal SambaServer inaccessible when ISP goes down

[Russell A. Bell]

	'The best thing to do is to setup a local DNS server for your
network, at least so it gets a 'host not found' earlier.  Or you could
just list the hosts in /etc/hosts if its a smaller network.'

	'one way to end all that is to have a hosts file on the client
machines.'

	'I wrote complaining about this a few months ago and never got
a 'good' answer, but we saw exactly the same results. If you check the
archives though I believe there has been some good discussion about
this - particularly centered around adding your hosts to /etc/hosts. I
recall that it wasn't even necessary to put names, just the ip
numbers.'

	1) I already had all the machines listed in /etc/hosts and
/etc/lmhosts and on the client machines.
	2) I could ping, telnet, and ftp SambaServer from the Windoze
machines, proving 1).
	3) 1) does not matter: the external DNS does not resolve
internal names.
	I can make sense of the problem only by presuming that nmbd
believes it necessary to connect to some external address (a 'silent'
external samba server that participated in a previous election?).
Since I want Samba to handle only internal traffic I could disable
this if I understood the code well enough.  I see the call, I could
make it do nothing but return success, but I don't know all the
ramifications of this.

russell bell