samba - Aug 2000 - Errors encountered : " remote server is unavailable"

[Moved to samba@samba.org --dave]> 
>         I'm currently using samba2.04 on HPUX 10.20 with client
connections
> from Win NT and Win 2000. Intermittently, the NT/Win2000 clients cannot
> resolve the server name. They encountered the error "remote server is
> unavailable". However, if the clients were to connect using the IP
address
> of the server, the connection is established. When we testing
"ping" from
> the client to the server, the client can resolve the hostname to ip
address.
> Has anyone encoutered this problem before .... Any advise on how to resolve
> it ??
	You have an name service problem: Windows doesn't
	(normally) use dns, so ping works and browsing
	doesn't.

	I'd establish a WINS server, and tell the clients about it:
	see http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/chapter/book/ch03_01.html
	for a few hints.

	This will allow the name lookup to run more reliably, and
	machines to disappear less often.  Alas, that's "more"
	not "completely": browsing is probabalistic, and WINS
	is not as robust as dns...  which is why MS is doing
	more DNS these days.

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
185 Ellerslie Ave.,   | and astonish the rest.        -- Mark Twain
Willowdale, Ontario   | //www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/author.html
Work: (905) 415-2849 Home: (416) 223-8968 Email: davecb@canada.sun.com

Hi,

I am having a similar problem when my server is having problems
with DNS. Here's the scenario - I have a unix server which runs
all of our main services (sendmail, DNS, apache and samba). We
have had some problems with our ISP lately as they underwent a
major change and we lost outside connectivity. Our local
machine was 'very unhappy' not being able to do DNS queries,
particularly since we do not control our reverse zone (we have
a subnet of a class C from our ISP). 

What happens under these situations is that established
connections normally behave ok but new connections can't be
established - I get 'Network is busy' error messages, etc.
and things really start to bog down.

It's not going to be easy to correct this quickly, so I am
wondering if it's worth putting up WINS on the Samba box to
keep this name resolution problem (when our connectivity is
hosed) from affecting internal network connections.

I can provide more information on our setup if needed but in
general I was wondering about WINS vs DNS in a local network
situation. Our clients are all Win9x at this point if that
makes a difference.

Thanks for any input -

Rich Parker
Director of Engineering
Vermont Public Radio