Our Primary internal Samba server sits at our HQ. It provides WINS
services for all of our internal machines. We have a number of IPSEC
VPN's that connect our remote offices to the HQ. Given that our Remote
offices are relatively small we haven't found it necessary to equip them
with machines running samba to provide local services. Instead all the
requests for name resolution/shares/printer info/etc come across the VPN
to the primary system at our HQ. Everything works great, except, we have
issues with Samba *Forgetting* that printers at our remote offices
exist. You can still reach them via \\machine\printername, but a generic
listing of \\machine\ fails to list the printer. Funnily enough you can
still add the printer(\\machine\printername) and subsequently print to
it for a limited duration of time, but eventually, you have to manually
remove(on the client side) the printer and re-add it to get things going
again. This doesn't happen on Windows 95/98 clients. Only on windows
2000+ clients, and only if it's a remote printer. We don't do anything
fancy with Samba, it's simply used to provide file and printer sharing
for our Wintel clients. If I haven't painted a clear enough picture,
please review the following:
Samba Server
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HQNEt -----IPSEC SG------INTERNET-----IPSEC SG------REMOTENET
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PRINTER(PrintSrvr)
Yes having the client spool the data across the GW's and back is not the
most efficient use of BW, but isn't a problem given the size of our
remote nets.
Anybody have any ideas why this might be?
Your help is greatly appreciated.
Chris
