[Samba] Connecting two LANs over a slow link

[Malte Starostik]

Hi,

I'm having some trouble connecting the SMB networks on two LANs that are
connected over a "slow" (DSL) link:

Network B: 172.16.0.0/24
Domain B: office

Network A: 172.16.1.0/24
Domain A: home

gate.office and gate.home are the respective networks' NAT gateways
connecting to the internet over ADSL lines. The private IP spaces are
connected to each other via an ipsec tunnel between those two gateway boxes.
pdc.office and pdc.home are the PDCs and WINS servers for domains office and
home respectively (in the case of home the same box as the gateway). In
reality they are not called pdc.*, so there are no name clashes in the
entire WAN even if removing the domain names.

Normal IP services work fine and SMB networking accross the tunnel works as
long as remote computers are searched for or specified (in UNC paths etc.)
with their FQDN. Browsing doesn't work at all save for the remote domain
name showing up as an empty workgroup in the Network Neighbourhood (blocking
Explorer for quite some time when trying to list the workgroup's machines.
Similarly from the samba boxes (PDCs and a few others), smbclient -L will
only find remote servers with -I <some_host_on_the_remote_side>. The output
*does* list both PDCs as master for their respective workgroup/domain
though.

As the tunnel between the networks is pretty slow (128kbps upstream only on
each side) and not too reliable - it's theoretically up 24/7 but in praxis
there are one or two short periods (0-5 minutes) of disconnection daily.

In order not to slow down or temporarily disable local operations in both
networks, I definately wouldn't like to have only one WINS server and/or PDC
for the entire WAN.
Currently both PDCs are set to remote announce and remote browse sync to the
other site's PDC, but it doesn't look like that did any good :-(

So what I'm basically missing:
* find SMB hosts w/o domain suffix
* propagate browse lists between the two networks while keeping them rather
separated otherwise

FWIW, home contains samba 3.0.0, Win2k and WinXP hosts, in office there is
samba 2.2.8a, Win98 and WinXP