samba - Oct 2004 - WinXP vs Samba: domain controller could not be contacted

Hi,
when I try to connect with a Windows XP Professional workstation to my domain 
(My Computer->Computer Name ...), I keep getting the error message "A
domain
controller for the domain ... could not be contacted". This attempt leaves
no
traces in the samba logs. 
I have applied the recommended WinXP registry tweaks. I am pretty shure that I 
have typed the domain name right. nmdb is running on the samba server.
Strange enough, I can connect to the samba server if I enter its IP directly in 
Start->Run. Reversely, I can also connect from the samba server to the XP 
machine with smbclient. 
I guess this a problem with netbios/wins, but I am out of ideas. What could it 
be? I have found the same question lots of times on google, but never any 
solutions. Help please!
   Martin

Martin Wartens schreef:
> I guess this a problem with netbios/wins, but I am out of ideas. What could
it
> be? I have found the same question lots of times on google, but never any 
> solutions. Help please!
>    Martin
> 
How about your name resolution. Can you resolve the netbios name of the 
samba server? Try ping netbiosname.
Can you resolve the FQDN. Try ping hostname.domain (like www.google.com).
If you can't resolve, try adding the host to lmhost file 
(system32\drivers\etc\lmhost) and then nbtstat -R .
If you can resolve, did you actually join the domain? Are you on the 
same subnet. Is your firewall blocking (maybe xp sp2 firewall active).

Look in your nmbd.log file for entries that state that your machine is a 
doamin master browser and a local master browser (if you have 1 pdc, no 
bdc).

Finally I found out that I had to add the samba server's IP address to the
wins
entry in the network configuration and reboot afterwards. I also switched 
on "enable netbios over TCP/IP". The Norton Internet Security firewall
can also
cause this "domain could not be contacted" error, how I found out
independently
from the above problem. 
Later I stumbled in another problem: When I tried to join the domain I got the 
error message "user does not exist". I found out that the "add
user script"
doesn't add machines anymore and is now called "add machine
script". Again this
error left no trace in the logs. Why are there logs if they don't log
anything?
Setting up XP with Samba was a real nightmare. Why isn't there some useful 
documentation that shows which settings really need to be made in Windows XP? 
Why aren't there useful error messages?
So long, Martin