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
feenb...@nber.org
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