Samba won't dance (more info)

[Craig White]

On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 23:06 +0930, Tim wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-04-15 at 08:10 -0400, Claude Jones wrote:
> > I've noticed that sometimes, changes you make to Samba networking
> > don't 'take' instantly, even when you restart smb and nmb services 
> 
> That's the nature of the beast.  Changes don't happen instantly, and
> changes invoke another contest round for who gets to be the master,
> which can introduce a lot of delays.
----
samba re-reads its configuration file once per minute. Therefore a
restart of smb and nmb will only speed recognition up by only a few
seconds.

NMB stores a cache file which may be useful to
delete.../var/cache/samba/wins.dat and if you then restart nmb, it
rebuilds it much in the same fashion as I had you perform in my first
post...an nmblookup. The reason to use a 'WINS' server is when you have
computers on different network/subnets which will not be reachable by
standard broadcast methods because they are on different subnets and at
that point, you choose a system to be a wins server and configure all
other systems to be a WINS client.

But a samba client does not need nmb...only a samba client that wants to
participate in Master Browser elections.

Either way and regardless of all of the above, if you can't reliably
ping the other systems and they don't show up in a broadcast search,
it's clear that there is a hardware problem and that endlessly fooling
with software will not solve it.

Craig