samba - May 1999 - One of two samba servers not visible (remote announce problem?)

I have (more than) three subnets:

A:  all unix (I think)
B:  mixed unix and PC's
C:  all PC's (I think)

I have a samba server on both A and B.  They have
essentially identical configurations.  Both are running
the nmbd daemon, and are configured as
workgroup = XXSAMBA.

I have a PC on C.  Both net view /domain:XXSAMBA
and network neighborhood show only the server on B.
I assumed that nmbd was doing a local broadcast on
B which was being heard by one of the PC's on B, and
then got passed along the browsing system, so that the
PC on C could ultimately see it.

According to this theory, the server on A was also
broadcasting its existence, but since nobody was
acting as a local browse master, nobody heard it.

Therefore I added 'remote announce = xxx.yyy.zzz.255'
to point to subnet C in server A's smb.conf.  This didn't work.
Then I tried 'remote announce = xxx.yyy.qqq.www' to
point to the wins server (on yet another subnet) used by
the PC on subnet C.  This also didn't work.

Anyone have any ideas?  Since one of the two servers
shows up in the browse list, I thought I was on the
right track, but now I'm stuck.

(I can connect to the shares on the server just fine by
hand, but as a convenience I'd like to have it show up
in the browse list.)

This is samba 2.0.0 on solaris 2.6.  Most of the PC's
are ntws4.0, sp4, although there are also nt servers
and miscellaneous clients.

     Frank R.Brown
     Frank.R.Brown@MailAndNews

I have a partial solution to my problem:

The problem was that the samba server on the all-unix
subnet (A) was not visible to browsing (although it
accepted connections just fine), while the samba server
on the mixed subnet (B) showed up in the browse lisr
as expected.

I tried various 'remote announce' configurations (to subnet
C, to C's wins server , and to C's wins server's subnet),
without luck.

Then I was playing around with 'nmblookup' and saw samba
server A as the only browser on subnet A (no surprise).  I
saw three browsers on subnet B --- one of which was samba
server B!  (None appeared to be wins servers.)  So just as a casual
experiment, I set server A's 'remote announce' to point directly to
server B's ip address.

This seems to work perfectly.  Now server A shows up in the
browse list, including the list as seen from subnet C.

I have two concerns:

The first is that I don't understand what is going on, so I'm worried
that this setup will turn out to be flaky.

Secondly, I didn't expect to see samba become a browser on the
mixed network.  I would have thought it would invariably lose
elections to the native nt boxes.  Therefore my concern is that
it won't usually be a browser, so my 'remote announce' directly
to it won't do any good.

Could someone clue me it to what is going on here?  Thanks.

I wrote:
> I have (more than) three subnets:
> 
> A:  all unix (I think)
> B:  mixed unix and PC's
> C:  all PC's (I think)
> 
> I have a samba server on both A and B.  They have
> essentially identical configurations.  Both are running
> the nmbd daemon, and are configured as
> workgroup = XXSAMBA...
     Frank R.Brown
     Frank.R.Brown@MailAndNews