[Samba] Re: problem with nmbd renewing WINS registration

[Jeremy Allison]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 01:56:44PM -0700, Jason Barker wrote:
> Hello again everyone,
> We've got a Samba 2.2.3a server (Red Hat 7.2) running here, and it works
> great, even winbind. We have had a slight problem ever since setting it up
> though. A few weeks after setup was finished, and a bunch of stuff had been
> moved onto it, some people could not access the server from the Network
> Nieghboorhood. Pinging worked fine, as did connecting directly to it's IP
> (\\aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd). Being in a hurry (Friday, you know), I restarted the
> server really quick and everything was OK. So, I said "Huh, we'll see if it
> happens again."
> Well, a couple of weeks later, it did happen again. After doing some poking
> around, the server's entry in DNS was OK, but it was no longer registered in
> the WINS. I ran some searches on the mailing list, and there are quite a few
> people who have reported the same problem in the past. It would seem the
> nmbd is not renewing it's WINS registration before/after the release
> timeout. This time, instead of restarting the entire server, I just
> restarted the nmbd daemon, and poof, it registered itself with the WINS.
> Now I know what to do to take care of the problem next time, but it is not a
> very nice solution. I was wondering if there has been any work done to fix
> this problem (perhaps in HEAD?). If someone has tried to track it down
> before, and was unsucessful, would it be possible to at least include
> something the next release so that I can give nmbd a kick in the butt, and
> tell it "Hey! Renew yourself in the WINS, now!"?

nmbd should be renewing its WINS registrations.

Check out the function :

refresh_my_names() in nmbd/nmbd_mynames.c which is called
periodically from the main loop.

To get nmbd to dump the name information (which should include
death time, refresh time etc.) hit nmbd with a SIGHUP signal.

It will dump all this information into a file called namelist.debug
in the var/locks directory. This should help you track down the
problem.

Jeremy.