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From: Daniel Feenberg on 15 Mar 2010 19:40

We have two FreeBSD 8.0 Samba (3.3.9) servers running with
identical smb.conf files, except for the workgroup and
netbios parameters. Both serve files flawlessly, but only
the first is normally visible to browsing by XP and Win7
clients. Interestingly, if we reboot the first server,
then the invisible (second) server becomes visible for
several minutes, but then disappears again and is no
longer browsable. It still serves files, though. Does this
odd behavior suggest anything in particular that might be
wrong?

I assume there is some problem with "wins" but don't
understand the relationship between wins and browsing well
enough to know where to go.

We have tried setting "wins support=yes" on one of
the machines, but it has no effect.

We have 1) no domain controller 2) one subnet 3) no
dynamic dns 4) haven't configured clients for wins.

One clue we can't figure out is the response to nmblookup.
Here is the result for the browseable server:

nber18# nmblookup -M first-group
querying first-group on xx.yy.3.255
xx.yy.3.75 first-group<1d>

xx.yy.3.75 is a Windows 2003 Server box, which is
reasonable, but the "querying first-group" line doesn't
describe our network, which is a /23 starting at xx.yy.2.0
and therefore xx.yy.3.255 can't really describe the broadcast
address for our subnet. I don't know if this has anything
to do with our real problem, but it caught our attention.
The response for the second (invisible) server is similar,
but no server is found:

nber18# nmblookup -M second-group
querying second-group on xx.yy.3.255
name_query failed to find name second-group#1d

It seems to us that the absence of a nameserver could
possibly explain the loss of browseability, but our
windows clients don't generally seem to be using the
server, at least according to the "nbtstat -r" command,
which usually (but not always) says that "Resolved by Name
Server" is zero.

We don't really care if name service is provided by Samba
or Windows, provided our samba shares are browseable.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Daniel Feenberg
feenberg(a)nber.org
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