rparker@VPR.net
2000-Nov-11 23:49 UTC
House of the Rising Samba Sun (or Don't Do What I Have Done)
Errgh, what a long day - just hope someone can benefit (and be forwarned) by my error. I have been putting all my hosts behind a firewall (linux RH6.2/ipchains) so they could talk to a Win2K box and not have it exposed too much ;) Also, I moved to a new ISP and this seemed just the dandy way to not have to re-ip all the machines on the same day as the switch over. So, in testing the setup I have been working from my workstation behind the wall and this weekend I made the major switch to a new ISP. The benefit is that almost all my local clients were now behind a 172.x.x.x network so I only had to change a couple of outside machines. Couldn't browse from behind the firewall, but I thought 'well, the clients can connect, I can map the drives so I'll deal with it later'. Great so far. The ISP switch goes off reasonably well. Now, I wanted to test some printing, etc. so I change the IP on my machine, hook up to the hub outside the firewall (where my samba server is). No big deal, I reboot and ssh into my unix box, look over the printers, etc. test them from lpr and so forth and everything is fine. Ok, so I notice I'm not connected to my shares anymore. And I CAN'T connect to them from my box. So, of course I look at everything, cables, network properties, delete old .pwl files (since I had been logging into the NT domain earlier from behind the firewall I thought that might be a culprit, etc.) I dutifully go through all the steps in diagnosis.txt and of course everything works until I get to my client machine....arrgh. OF COURSE, IT'S ONLY A PROBLEM on MY MACHINE! (the other clients outside the firewall are just fine thanks...) Oddly, I can 'see' the drives I used to have mapped with those lovely little red x's on them (I suppose the browser remembered that they USED to be there but it can't open them now..) So, I wish I could say which of these made the difference, but I finally said to myself, 'self, maybe you should turn the bloody thing off, let it stew for a while and turn it back on' and THEN I also remembered that I had long before put in an entry for the samba server (when I was testing cross subnet browsing) in an LMHOSTS file on my client machine. OF COURSE, that LMHOSTS file had the samba server at the OLD IP NUMBER (remember, I changed everything this weekend). So, I removed that, and shut down, powered down and when everything came back up, VOILA! I could see my shares and everything is just fine (except it's dark, I'm tired and starting to notice I'm really hungry...). So, hard to say what the culprit was but chalk it up to simple things being the biggest traps (and time wasters). I vote heavily for the misconfigured LMHOSTS entry, but at this point I'm not feeling any too clever. Anyway, may this be a lesson to someone (hopefully) cheers, Rich Parker Director of Engineering Vermont Public Radio