[Samba] WINS problem browsing subnets

[John H Terpstra]

On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, David Kruger wrote:

> I have the IP of the WINS address configured on a few computers at each
> location for testing, but these computers are constantly running, so the
> problem should not be anything with the client being shut down.

When you put the IP address of the WINS server into the WINS addresses on
each Windows client did you reboot the remote windows client?

When the client rebooted, did that machine then appear in the wins.dat
file? If not, did you sniff the local network segment on which the WINS
server is located to see if it was receiving the name registration from
the remote windows client as it restarted?

If the remote name registration was not received, is the remote Windows
client able to ping the WINS server? ie: Is routing correctly configured?

If the netbios name registration request packet was received from the
remote Windows client, set the "log level = 5" on the WINS server, repeat
the exercise, and find in the nmbd logs what it did with the name
registration request from the remote Windows client. By rights it should
have added it to the wins.dat database. You can confirm this by using
nmblookup.

Additionally, check that the from the WINS server you can ping the remote
Windows client by IP address. ie: Routing is set up correctly.

Also, check that you can ping the remote Windows client by netbiod name.
To enable this you need to install in libnss_wins.so in /lib, you will
also need to set in /etc/nsswitch.conf:

hosts:	files dns wins

> I am guessing that I am missing some sort of entries in the smb.conf
> files that are needed.  I did check the firewalls and UDP 137, 138 and
> TCP 139 are open.

Nope. MS Windows clients register themselves at start-up. This is
documented in the new Samba-HOWTO-Collection.pdf that shipped with
Samba-3.0.0RC1 last friday. See chapter 10.

> Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

I hope it helps.

- John T.

>
> >>> John H Terpstra <jht at samba.org> 08/18/03 03:35PM >>>
> On Mon, 18 Aug 2003, David Kruger wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I am having some trouble with browsing accross subnets using WINS.
> > Each subnet has a RedHat 9 box running Samba 2.2.7a which is configured
> > as the LMB.  WINs support is enabled on one of the systems which is
> > configured as the DMB.  I have browse list sync enabled on each of the
> > LMB computers to sync with the DMB.  When browsing using Network
> > neighborhood I am able to see in the list of computers all of the
> > computers on the 3 subnets that have shared resources, but when trying
> > to connect to any of these computers I get a network path not found.  I
> > checked the DMB browse.dat file which is where all of the computer names
> > are showing up, but in the wins.dat file it has only the computers
> > listed that are on the same subnet as the DMB.  If I manually add the IP
> > and NetBIOS name of the computers to the hosts file on the DMB then I am
> > able to browse the computer.  Is there a way to get all of the browse
> > list entries to be added to the WINS list automatically?
>
> Have you set the IP address of the WINS server in the WINS address in
> TCP/IP configuration on everyy Windows client?
>
> - John T.
>

-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org