samba - Sep 2004 - WINS names intermittently unregister after 5 days

Hi,

(I posted this question about 6 months ago and never really got anywhere
with it so I thought I'd try again.)

We're using Samba as a WINS server. Windows servers appear to correctly
register themselves and I can look them up e.g. with nmblookup.

However some servers lose their registration after 5 days. And it's the
same servers, about 4 (of about 25 servers and 200 workstations).

I can't find any similarity between these servers, there's one NT 4
server and 3 Win2000 servers with varying service packs. I can get the
names to re-register by restarting the server but this registration is
again lost after 5 days.

Does anyone have any experience of this or can suggest any tests to help
me troubleshoot?

(I realize this problem probably isn't Samba's fault but I can't
find
any reference to this issue anywhere else).

Samba 3.0.4 on RedHat 9.0.

Thanks,

Leon...

Hi Leon

Realising it isnt quite relevent to your posting, I had trouble sometime 
ago with our company PDC's WINS record disappearing from the corporate 
WINS box. Rebooting our PDC would make it appear again.

In our case we never did quite resolve the reason (both NT4 boxes) but 
doing a manual clean on the WINS servers (about 4 of them) fixed it. 
There was some thought that errant data was being propogated in a 
circle. What I am getting at here is similar things happen with the M$ 
product.

I'll admit that I dont know how to display the status of the Samba WINS 
service. If you can figure out how to have a look at the age/timout of 
the record and whether any duplicate names have occurred. Do an nbstat 
on the M$ boxes too to see if and conflicts have occurred.

Does using lmhosts (say on the dissappearing servers) stop WINS lookups 
(and hence refreshing) after a while? Just a thought.

Might be worthwhile checking whether the four servers in question starts 
as a master browser or not, and whether during an election sends 
different data to the WINS server. Have a look at the event logs after 
startup. I have no idea whether this might cause a problem, it is the 
only thing I could come up with when trying to debug our fix.

Apologies for not being much more use on this.

Cheers Bob

Leon Stringer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> (I posted this question about 6 months ago and never really got anywhere
> with it so I thought I'd try again.)
> 
> We're using Samba as a WINS server. Windows servers appear to correctly
> register themselves and I can look them up e.g. with nmblookup.
> 
> However some servers lose their registration after 5 days. And it's the
> same servers, about 4 (of about 25 servers and 200 workstations).
> 
> I can't find any similarity between these servers, there's one NT 4
> server and 3 Win2000 servers with varying service packs. I can get the
> names to re-register by restarting the server but this registration is
> again lost after 5 days.
> 
> Does anyone have any experience of this or can suggest any tests to help
> me troubleshoot?
> 
> (I realize this problem probably isn't Samba's fault but I
can't find
> any reference to this issue anywhere else).
> 
> Samba 3.0.4 on RedHat 9.0.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Leon...
>

>Realising it isnt quite relevent to your posting, I had trouble
sometime
>ago with our company PDC's WINS record disappearing from the corporate 
>WINS box. Rebooting our PDC would make it appear again.
>In our case we never did quite resolve the reason (both NT4 boxes) but 
>doing a manual clean on the WINS servers (about 4 of them) fixed it. 
>There was some thought that errant data was being propogated in a 
>circle. What I am getting at here is similar things happen with the M$ 
product.

Bob, thanks for your reply. It does sound very similar. You've listed
some good ideas to try, I'll have to work through these.