Howdy all:
I thought I had this problem beaten into submission, but I guess
not. We just got our first NT box, which is another new wrinkle...
Anyway, the LAN just went belly-up again yesterday, and when the
LAN guy disconnected my linux/samba box from the network, Network
Neighborhood came right back. I still don't think it's a
linux/samba problem, but I'm certainly no authority on network
troubleshooting (but then, neither is our LAN guy...).
Config:
16 win95 (OSR/2) clients, 1 NT4SP3 (workstation) client, 1
linux/samba box (RH 4.2, kernel 2.0.30, 1.9.18p8). Almost all
clients (including linux) are configured to dial out to a local ISP
for mail, internet, etc. They also dial one of two corporate WAN
connections (VPN on the corp side hasn't quite worked as advertised
yet) so some of the clients have multiple external DNS, etc,
defined.
For the LAN, I have identical hosts and lmhosts on each client, as
well as /etc/hosts and /etc/lmhosts on the samba box (no WINS yet).
TCP/IP is the only protocol being used currently. Samba is set to
be the local master & preferred master with OS level = 65, so it
should beat out the NT box (right?).
Symptoms:
Everything seems to work fine for a week or so (except the
occasional windoze box getting confused, losing network
neighborhood, getting rebooted, and then coming back). Then
browsing gets completely hosed up. Even mapping a network drive
with an explicit path doesn't work. In the past, hit and miss
troubleshooting (eg, swapping NICs in a machine that can't see
others, fiddling with cables and connectors, etc) fixes it for a
while, but the problem always comes back. We can ping all day
long; the problem is not with the TCP/IP layer. Also, all the
tests in diagnosis.txt work fine. Any ideas anyone? We have no
real network analysis tools, etc. Are we just clueless, or does
this SMB/CIFS stuff just suck the big schween? Can a network card
appear to work but send out crap that confuses other machines?
We're in the process of converting over from 10Base2 to 10Base-T;
is it possible for these kinds of problems to be caused by flaky
coax connectors, bad cable, etc? It seems to me that if it was
really hardware related, then the TCP/IP layer wouldn't work either.
I'm going to try some of the samba config parameters (name resolve
order, WINS, etc) but it seems to me these problems shouldn't be
happening.
Any tips, pointers, ideas, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in
advance, Steve
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Stephen L. Arnold Senior Systems Engineer
ENSCO Inc. email: arnold.steve@ensco.com
P.O. Box 5488 www: http://www.ensco.com
Vandenberg AFB, CA 93437 voice: 805.734.8232 x68838
fax: 805.734.4779
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