> On Thu, 2003-06-05 at 10:04, Price Technology wrote: > > <Much snippage here> > > A funny thing happened whilst I was working on the original email. > Didn't want to disrupt myself until I was sure. > > I had attached my laptop and booted into W2k and made sure the symptoms > were the same there as with other winders boxes, which they were. > > While composing the message, I tried "Network Servers" again to clarify > the error message and saw my network. This led me to check event logs > on Morticia as well as Gomez and I found that Morticia was complaining > about Lurch claiming it was browse master, forcing stoppage of the > browser service and / or election. > > Upon rebooting, Gomez became the elected one (per the way winders does > it) and Gomez began complaining about the same thing. > > Nothing in the "smb.conf" file suggests that Lurch should even consider > itself a candidate for browse master, but I did make one change: > Uncommented the line that says "local master = no" which explicitly > tells the Linux box not to participate in browser elections. > > This fixed the problem of Linux not seeing winders boxes and I was even > able to access shares. However, the reverse was still an issue. > > Having eliminated the "browse master" confusion, I checked what should > have been obvious all along, firewall settings, though the error didn't > necessarily appear to be firewall related. > > I downloaded "FireStarter", installed, and configured my firewall with > it. (sorry, but my feeble old brain can't remember where the files > abide, how the rules should be formed, etc.) > > Everything works like a charm now, except pinging by machine name. I > think I can live without that. > > Bottom line is: > Samba configured using gui tool > smb.conf edited to uncomment "local master = no" > firewall configured to allow smb / netbios traffic on the local net > > Since I noted similar postings in the archives, it seems I'm not the > only one experiencing such problems. I hope this information helps one > or more of them. > > Joebewan Hopefully, a bit more useful info ... When a browser election occurs I think it can even take up to 15 minutes to sort itself out - be patient :-) I disable brower master on all Win98 and all Win computers that get rebooted (I have Win2000Pro as a file server - it's the master) To see if a Win machine itself is the master browser: nbtstat -n And you will see a name like "..__MSBROWSE__." on the master >From any Win machine, using each of the IP address of all the other machines (Win, Linux, ...): nbtstat -A a.b.c.d Will also let you find which one is the master browser I have an 'almost never' rebooted WinXPHome machine that is the only other that is allowed to be a master (if the file server ever goes down like it did a few weeks ago due to a power supply failure) I experimented with using one of my Linux boxes as a master before I reinstalled it to RH8.0 but I had a few problems and gave up (didn't try very hard :-) What really needs to be done is for someone to create a new open file share protocol that runs on Linux and Windows and then a few years later when it works well - we should all use it :-) samba on RH9 has introduced yet more annoying hard to reproduce problems :-( -- -Cheers -Andrew MS ... if only he hadn't been hang gliding!
