[LUNI] Samba and DNS Searches

[Beach, Ken]

Greetings from my non-broadband bunker, waiting (not so patiently) for my
connection to return <g>,

> From: Fhealy at aol.com [mailto:Fhealy at aol.com]
> 
> I need a little help with SAMBA settings.  I manage a 
> school network running off a Redhat 6.2 box acting as a
> bridge/firewall.  I also run Samba off the same box.  

Ummmm... I would recommend scamming a cheap 486 and separate the firewall
from the file server...

> Now that my AT&T Broadband connection is down (with the red 
> power light flashing on the now brain dead cable modem), 
> SAMBA still appears in the network neighborhood but will not 
> allow connections (I get network is busy on the windows 
> machine and a broken pipe error in the logfiles), likely 
> because DNS lookups are not working.  I have been able to 
> mount SMB shares on windows machines with the Linux systems 
> using smbmount.  Is there any way to set SAMBA not to touch 
> DNS and to know its own name from the host file or smb.conf?  
> I already tired adding a Netbios Name = CB######-a in smb.conf

I'm not entirely sure about your networking setup, but I'll bring up several
suggestions. Microsoft REALLY likes wins servers, I'd recommend having a
wins server on the network. MS products (and Samba) will gladly use this
when DNS is not available.

As far as the Samba server resolving names, you can do some nmblookup calls
and see if it is able to resolve other names on the network.
Example (this example /may/ require a wins server to function):
nmblookup -R <workstation name>

Lets see, also check your 'name resolve order' in smb.conf.... on one of my
default redhat boxes it leaves out host... on my debian boxen its "lmhosts
host wins bcast"... still, it should pick it up on broadcast, but you never
know.

Next, check to see if you have a 'hosts allow' flag set... if you do the
loss of DNS may be mucking with that.

Finally, you could always check your IPCHAINS rules... maybe something is
mucking it up there, or if Samba is running from inetd, maybe there is a
problem with your hosts allow/deny files.

Fear not, there is a good chance that the CableModem will be up today.

Cheers,
Ken