[K12OSN] Old K12, with samba issues, I think

musicman datakid at gmail.com
Thu Apr 21 05:36:42 UTC 2005


The NGO I sys admin for has a K12LTSP box doing DHCP, A Win2k Server
as PDC, and a Debian firewall/DNS/Router.

We have about 12 full WSs and about 3 thin terminals (up to five in a
week). The thin terminals were a cheap Window's replacement, and are
mostly used by administration staff to access our windows-based donors
database (powerflex! old stylin' headaches)

In the office, I am the only one that uses the Linux capabilities of
the K12 sys we have set up.

This is more a config question than anything else, I'm a huge linux
advocate, use kubuntu at home, and am hoping that this office will be
linux in 5 years or so, but in the mean time, we are a win shop (at
least while the db is win-based).

The problem I'm having is as follows:

We had a contractor come in and set the whole thing up, and he has
since effectively disappeared. I inherited this system, and it took me
almost this 3 months to even find out what it was running.

According to Paul Nelson, I'm running K12LTSP 3.1.2, red-hat release 9.

Apart from being utilised as a thin client manager, the K12 box also
acts as one of our redundant backups, using rsync.

When I first arrived, I noticed that it had been "running" every nite,
as planned (scheduled batch scripts on the win2K server, using
cygwin), but the disk was full, so it was not copying anything.

I deleted a bunch of files, and tried to start it up again, and found
that about 15 minutes after the rsync had started (midnight), the
win2K server had lost connection to the Domain.

It could still surf the web, so it hadn't lost all connectivity, but
the rest of the network could not see it, and it could not see them. A
simple restart was all that was required to solve the networking
problem, though the backup hadn't completed, not even close.

The only thing I ever found in the win2K logs was that a browser
election had happen around the same time.

Paul Nelson said it was definitely a samba issue, and not a browser
election issue.

Has anyone seen this before and do they know what might be causing it?

I work in a production environment (well, a struggling NGO) that needs
the K12 server up at all times, and there is no documentation about
what has been changed in the system from the previous contractor.
Hence my desire to upgrade to 4.2.0 is minimal since it does what we
want and we rarely use the linux capabilities it provides (ie, I don't
need the latest KDE/Gnome packages, I just need the rysnc to work)

I've been sitting here quitely for about a fortnight - it seems like a
very constructive, busy and knowledgable list, I hope I can put in
some of my own once I get up to speed on the K12.

Cheers

Lachlan Simpson, National Database & IT Support Officer
National Office
The Wilderness Society
57E Brisbane Street, Hobart TAS  7000, AUSTRALIA
Ph  +61 3 6270 1786
http://www.wilderness.org.au




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