[Samba] strange behaviour

[Roberto Sacchetti]

Hi all.

Last thursday I've had to restore my customer's pdc from an hdd failure, 
and by the evening I restored a full working state of server and 
clients, rejoining all of them to the domain.
Next morning the customer called me saying that nothing was working, I 
looked the server from remote without finding failures and then I went 
there: I found that clients couldn't find the pdc and I struggled with 
name resolution, but I didn't get the system up until I put the server's 
ip address in the WINS servers list in each client's TCP/IP configuration.
Can someone tell me what could cause this strange issue? I must say that 
the server wasn't shut down the thursday evening, only clients were.
What can I do to restore the working state without having to manually 
set the WINS server in each client?

Thank you in advance.

Roberto