[Samba] very very weird problem, Samba completely broken

[Eric Evans]

>probably would be much easier if you understood Windows Networking
>principles.

I'm sure it would, I'm trying my best to learn them.  In the meantime I 
have a bunch of users who are impatient to get this thing working ASAP and 
who are not patient enough to wait around while I read an entire book on 
Windows networking before tackling their problem.

>Nothing below suggests that you are using a WINS server...not in the
>Windows clients, not in smb.conf.

That is entirely correct.  I'm not using a WINS server and I have no need 
to use a WINS server.

>Make life easy for yourself, add 'wins support = yes' to smb.conf and
>change your dhcp server to use 128.253.175.150 as WINS server and node
>type = '8'

I have tried adding 'wins support = yes' to the smb.conf and it has no 
effect on this problem.  Furthermore I don't see why that should be 
necessary anyway since I'm not running a WINS server.  Also, I can't change 
our DHCP server because it is controlled by a centralized agency that I 
have no authority over, and I don't have configuration access to it.

>READ the documentation...Samba by Example does excellent handholding for
>the impatient...
>
>http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-Guide/
>
>I would suggest that you start with 'Small Office Networking'

Yes I agree that the documentation is important, and I assure you that I 
have been reading it and I'm still reading it.  I could just use a little 
help here, is all.

>Also note that firewalls would block access - probably a very good idea
>to run firewalls on these systems since they appear to have public IP
>addresses - thus a 'hosts allow = 128.253.175. ' would be a very good
>thing. Firewall would have to allow ports 137:139 and probably 445 from
>that same ip address range.

Not going across a firewall, so this is not a problem.

>Also note that you don't have any shares that users can see in your
>above configuration since a "HOMES" share is only pertinent to those
>that attach to a PDC/BDC and since you have surrendered that ground in
>frustration, you can't have it.

Now this is an interesting and surprising statement.  When we were running 
Samba 2 we were definitely not using PDC or BDC, but we had a homes share 
declared in the smb.conf and people were connecting to it every day without 
any difficulty.  But you're saying now that you can't connect to the homes 
share unless you are attaching to a PDC or BDC?  When did this happen?  Was 
this a change in Samba's policy that occurred when they went from version 2 
to version 3?

Thanks,
Eric