samba - Feb 2001 - problem with netbios aliases (nmbd restart solves it)

Hi,

I'm running samba 2.0.5a under Solaris 2.7 and am seeing a problem
where the netbios alias for our print server sometimes becomes
unavailable.  It is still visible in Network Neighbourhood, but
double-clicking comes back with "<blah> could not be found on the
network".  However, I can connect to the machine OK, by
double-clicking on its real name, rather than its alias.

I have noticed that to cure this problem all I have to do is restart
nmbd on the machine in question, but this is obviously not ideal.
Can anyone offer any explanations as to why this is happening and ways
round it?

Thanks in advance

Toby Blake
Division of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

I would guess that your alias is dropping out of the WINS server that you
have on your network. Clients may be finding our real name through DNS
resolution. You may want to register your Netbios alias with DNS. We tried
for a while to figure out with the NT group here how to keep our samba
servers from dropping out of the NT WINS server, but gave up and now
restart nmbd every night to prevent this from happening.

			Bill Knox
			Senior Operating Systems Programmer/Analyst
			The MITRE Corporation

On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, Toby Blake wrote:
> Date: Wed, 7 Feb 2001 17:33:35 GMT
> From: Toby Blake <toby@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
> To: samba@us5.samba.org
> Subject: problem with netbios aliases (nmbd restart solves it)
>
> Hi,
>
> I'm running samba 2.0.5a under Solaris 2.7 and am seeing a problem
> where the netbios alias for our print server sometimes becomes
> unavailable.  It is still visible in Network Neighbourhood, but
> double-clicking comes back with "<blah> could not be found on
the
> network".  However, I can connect to the machine OK, by
> double-clicking on its real name, rather than its alias.
>
> I have noticed that to cure this problem all I have to do is restart
> nmbd on the machine in question, but this is obviously not ideal.
> Can anyone offer any explanations as to why this is happening and ways
> round it?
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Toby Blake
> Division of Informatics
> University of Edinburgh
>
>