[Samba] Strange smbclient -L behaviour across WAN link

mitc company mitc60 at hotmail.com
Thu Jan 15 10:12:13 GMT 2004


Hello folks,

I hope somebody here can help shed light on this peculiar behaviour of 
smbclient.  When we execute:

smbclient -L <host>

and the host is across a VPN link traversing a WAN (DSL) link we get the 
following:

1. <host> is Windows 98SE: OK, smbclient completes
2. <host> is Windows XP or Samba 3.x: smbclient is able to retrieve the 
share list but hangs trying to get the Server browse list and the Workgroup 
list.
3. <host> is Samba 3.x that also terminates the VPN link (OpenVPN): OK, 
smbclient completes

When I do a packet capture using ethereal.  I see that the share list is 
retrieved by connecting over port 445.  The Server browse list and the 
Workgroup list are, however, retrieved over NETBIOS-SSN (139).  Further that 
the machine running smbclient -L is making multiple tries to connect to the 
remote machine's port 139 without getting an ACK in case #2 above.

Additional info:  all machines are in a workgroup that spans the WAN link.  
There is one WINS server on the local side of the VPN, however all machines 
including the remote ones are set to this single WINS server.

There are also other Windows XP machines on both side of the VPN link that 
does not seem to have any problems browsing shares and machines and even 
transfering files more than 10MB in size.

I would really appreciate any input on this.

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