samba - Jul 2002 - Weird thing.

I upgraded a fileserver I admin to samba 2.2.5 from 2.0.7 almost a week ago
and whlst I was on site today something very strange happened.
I found that I couldn't browse anything on network neighbourhood from any of
the machines and looking at the log files it appears that a windows98
machine managed to elect itself local master.

I have got the usual:

    local master = yes
   domain master = yes
 preffered master = yes

Also a Windows2000 machine that is on the network can now only mount one
share, with all the others it declares that the password is incorrect.

Am I doing anything obviously wrong.

(All clients set up to allow unencrypted passwords and so is the server,
this will change soon).

> I found that I couldn't browse anything on network neighbourhood from
any of
> the machines and looking at the log files it appears that a windows98
> machine managed to elect itself local master.
> 
> I have got the usual:
No you don't. :-)
>     local master = yes
>    domain master = yes
>  preffered master = yes
If that is actually what you have in your smb.conf, then you misspelled
preferred master.  This alone would explain why the Win98 system is the
local master, because if the preferred master parameter is not set, then
Samba may not initiate an election for master browser when it starts up,
and therefore not be able to win.  Run testparm and see if there are any
other errors.  Also, you can set the os level parameter to something large,
like this:

	os level = 65

You shouldn't really need this to win over Win98, since Samba's default
os level is 20, whereas Win98's is just 1.  Also, make sure you've set
your workgroup properly in your smb.conf.

Jay Ts
jay@jayts.cx