Recently, we've noticed that our Samba servers were no longer registered
on our NT-based WINS server. The WINS entries for the samba servers simply
expired and were not renewed. Restarting samba renewed the Wins name
registration.
We have multiple subnets or we wouldn't have noticed the problem: PCs on
the same subnet as the Samba server were still finding the server via
broadcast name resolution.
We are using security=domain and wins server=ntwinsserver. The samba
server is properly resolving the wins server computername. There are no
name registration errors logged in the log.smb file during the period
between when samba was last started and when the WINS registration
expired and was not re-established (there are some older name
registration error messages which appear to be irrelevant to this issue).
This occurred on two samba systems, one running 2.0.4b and one running
2.0.6. The expirations occurred at almost the same time on both
systems. This isn't the first time it's happened, we noticed it before,
but restarted samba before fully investigating the problem.
We're not sure of the sequence of events that causes this, but we know
that we recently had to reboot the NT WINS server, while the Samba
servers had not been rebooted for months. We've guessing that perhaps
when the WINS server goes down, Samba loses the connection to the wins
server, and does not re-establish it properly.
Has anyone else seen anything like this?
Our current workaround is to use static WINS entries for the samba
servers (since they used fixed IP addresses anyway).
