[Samba] Diagnosing Your Samba Server

[John McCawley]

Mark Mitchell wrote:

>The only difference is that all my
>Linux servers are unable to see computers on the network unless I put
>entries on the lmhosts file.  I assumed they should be able to do this
>through WINS or DNS.  Please help with this Samba problem.
>  
>

By default there is no netbios name lookup.  Here's a quickie on how to 
do it when you compile samba (assuming you have samba-latest.tar.gz in 
/usr/local):

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cd /usr/local
tar -zxvf samba-latest.tar.gz
cd samba*
cd source
./configure
make nsswitch/libnss_wins.so
cp nsswitch/libnss_wins.so /lib
ln -s /lib/libnss_wins.so /lib/libnss_wins.so.2
ldconfig

Edit the /etc/nsswitch.conf file and add wins on your hosts line.  My line looks like this:
hosts:      files nisplus dns wins


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That's a simplification, and doesn't take into account any other stuff 
you might be compiling into Samba, but that's the basic idea.

One thing:  this allows you to ping <hostname> but most applications 
still won't see the netbios names.  Someone more hardcore than I might 
be able to indicate what else you have to do to make it work system-wide.

John