Topic: Network Neighbourhood refresh hanging

[jreijsenbach]

Hi,

2 days ago I ran a Linux Box on the network. It showed up on the network neighbouhood and worked fine. I rebooted the linux box back into XP.

Problem: ever since when opening the network neighbourhood window the linux box is still shown.

Windows machines stay around a few minutes after they go off line but 2 days for a linux box is a bit too long..... actually its way too long

Question: How do I fix this short of rebooting the server?

Thanks for any hints and/or help.

Regards,

Jan

[NickR]

# service nmbd restart

[jreijsenbach]

Thanks Nick! it worked

Still this shouldn't have happened to begin with. Any ideas why this happens? And also how to prevent it from happening in the future?

I seem to recall when this type of thing happens usually after 15 or 30 minutes the network neighbourhood is resets itself and detects the online computers correctly.

So what causes it? I am thinking maybe nmdb needs to receive a log off message from its clients before it wil remove an entry. Another possibility might be that it fails to scan the network neighbourhood?

Anyway now that I now what services does this thing I will have a place to start from. If however you have further info, suggestions and or solutions please do tell

Regards,

Jan

[NickR]

Thanks Nick! it worked

Good  

OK, here are the reasons that you need to do this by hand:

1) Microsoft's SMB naming services are brain-dead, IMHO.  They rely on a lot of network "chatter" to ensure that the machine list is (more or less) up to date.

2) With (1) clearly understood, the way that the SME needs to interact with other Windoze machines is to be a bully & say "I'm in charge, don't talk amongst yourselves, refer all name questions to me". It does this by being the browse master and, in many scenarios, the WINS server also.

A side-effect of (2) is that if another Linux (or more properly a Samba) machine appears & then disappears from the workgroup, the namespace isn't reaped automatically if its master browser priority is the same as or higher than your primary SME.

[jreijsenbach]

Thanks Nick for your explanation.

It makes perfect sense.I have put the os level of the winsserver SME on 90 (was 65) and all problems seem to have disappeard.

I also checked the linux box and decreased its os level so I expect no more problems here ... I hope

Thanks again!

Regards,

Jan

[bugme]

can anyone tell me what that is?
i think i may need this but not sure.

our SME 6.0 final has a problem where our linksys gigadrive NAS (linux based) disappears or is hard to login to from my network places on xp and the only way to correct it, is to reboot the SME server every month or so.

is this the windows browser or a problem with samba on sme?

I tried search on the forum, but looks like this is the only relevant topic.

Thanks.

[raem]

bugme

> can anyone tell me what that is?

see /etc/smb.conf
see section called "os level"

To change this permanently you should create a custom template eg
/etc/e-mith/templates-custom/etc/smb.conf/11osLevel
by copying the original fragment, editing it, expanding the template and restarting the service.

For more info on browsing and elections see
/usr/share/doc/samba-2.2.8a/docs/textdocs/BROWSING.txt


In Win2K registry you might check this setting
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Browser\Parameters\MaintainServerList

It has a default setting of Auto, change it to No


Thanks to Gordon for pointing out this info about smb.conf to me.

[bugme]

A side-effect of (2) is that if another Linux (or more properly a Samba) machine appears & then disappears from the workgroup, the namespace isn't reaped automatically if its master browser priority is the same as or higher than your primary SME.

Ah, that may actually be it.
We added a Linksys EFG250 NAS device about 6 months ago, and that's about when this started happening. I should have known.

I wonder why its okay for days/weeks after a SME reboot, and then the disappearing SME problem crops up for Windows users again?

So what's the best level settings to set SME 6.0 and figure out what the NAS is set to, if that even matters, as there is no console so there's no way to get into it or send commands, that I know of...

Thanks for the tip!