samba - Apr 2002 - Samba 2.2.3a nmbd failures

We have Samba 2.2.3a running on Solaris 8 serving some 200 users. It's
configured as a logon server, and serves logons for Win9x clients.

Since upgrading to 2.2.3a, however, we've experienced problems with nmbd.
It'll work fine for a couple of days, and will then stop responding to
logins; clients just get an error message saying that no server is available
to authenticate the logon. Killing the nmbd process and restarting it usually
recovers the situation. The nmbd log file (log level 2) doesn't appear to
offer much clue; it lists the processing of a logon normally, without
mentioning any problems.

This is a bit of a show-stopper for us! We also have a test machine running
Linux and 2.2.3a, which is set up almost identically except that it uses
encrypted passwords and serves logons for a few Win2000 and XP clients; that,
however, suffers in the same way - it'll run for a couple of days, and then
needs to have nmbd restarted. On both machines the source was built using the
following arguments to configure:

./configure --libdir=/etc/samba --mandir=/usr/local/man
--localstatedir=/var/samba --with-privatedir=/etc/samba/private
--with-lockdir=/var/samba/locks

It sounds like there may be some problem with the login code in 2.2.3a.
I've seen one other mention of this problem on the list archive, but no
others, so I guess it's not that common. Does anyone know if using the CVS
version is likely to improve the problem?

Thanks,

Brian.

-- 
Brian Ruth (b.ruth@ucl.ac.uk)
Department of Anatomy, University College London.

> Since upgrading to 2.2.3a, however, we've experienced problems with 
nmbd.
> It'll work fine for a couple of days, and will then stop responding to
> logins; clients just get an error message saying that no server is 
available
> to authenticate the logon. Killing the nmbd process and restarting it 
usually
> recovers the situation. The nmbd log file (log level 2) doesn't appear 
to
> offer much clue; it lists the processing of a logon normally, without
> mentioning any problems.
This is most likely fixed in CVS (I saw a patch about WINS registration on 
this list)

I had this same problem for quite a while, and found that the WINS entry 
for the samba PDC was being removed. To get around the problem without 
patching, I suggest you edit /etc/hosts and add an entry for the netbios 
name of your PDC and it's network address. I found that my system had PDC 
set to 127.0.0.1, which told the clients to try to authenticate to 
themselves, which what was failing.

Regards,
Josh Marshall.