[plug] Samba query

[Shackleton, Kevin]

On this general subject, I just spent a couple more hours (the total is
getting out of hand . .) trying to figure what a school network is doing.
It's exhibiting the strangest symptoms, such as hosts can't ping other hosts
on the same subnet (all Winxx).  One curious statistic is that tcpdump shows
a lot of 'arp who-has' messages.

While I'd like to take the whole network down and build it back up bit by
bit, I can't see that happening in the next few weeks (for one I've got to
go off fencing contracting).

Is there a well-known (to someone!) problem that would lead to this
behaviour?  I can't decide if it's the Cisco switch confusing the network by
not broadcasting broadcasts, or if it's the WinNT host set up as a PDC and
as the router between the admin and curriculum networks (MS specifically
recommend against this).  Maybe even it's DHCP server leading the clients to
know very little about themselves.

I'd like to think that a Linux host on the network (providing in the first
instance browse master and WINS services) would instantly cure the problems.
However that wasn't the case, but I'm sure a few hours of bringing the
system back up using Linux services rather than NT would show what was the
problem.

K.