[Samba] NetBIOS Alias Browse Issues

[Chris Pratt]

Hoping someone could give me a push in the right direction or if anyone has
seen a similar problem before...

I inherited a mixed Solaris/RedHat/NT server environment each running some
version of Samba 2.X.X.  My desktops are all Windows clients.  My PDC is a
RedHat Samba server and has WINS enabled.  I only have a few NT servers
(added as needed for certain client/server apps) which exist only in the
workgroup and do not participate as domain members.

We had experienced some corporate downsizing and our network resources were
much more than our current needs warranted.  In order to better allocate and
reuse some of my server resources a few months ago I started consolidating
some of the old servers.  In the last few months I have decommissioned four
servers and moved their data to a single large file server.  I recreated the
shares from each old server on the new server, changed each of the
decommissioned servers DNS records from their own A to a CNAME for the new
server, and added each name to a server aliases directive on the new server.

The problem that I am having is that the NetBios aliases seem to display
only intermittently when browsing in Net Neighborhood from my Windows
clients.  As I write this I can only see the true server name itself and the
last alias in my list.  The first three aliases do not show in Net
Neighborhood but are accessable and work correctly if I open them manually:
Start --> Run --> \\server_alias_name.  In my smb.conf I have all of the
aliases on one line: server aliases = alias_1 alias_2 alias_3 alias_4.  I
have also tried them on separate lines:

server aliases = alias_1
server aliases = alias_2
server aliases = alias_3
server aliases = alias_4

and get similar same browse results in Net Neighborhood.  Any help would be
appreciated.

Chris