[plug] Samba query

[Leon Brooks]

"Shackleton, Kevin" wrote:
> It's exhibiting the strangest symptoms, such as hosts can't ping other hosts
> on the same subnet (all Winxx).

> Is there a well-known (to someone!) problem that would lead to this
> behaviour?

See previous paragraph, parenthesised section. (-:

> One curious statistic is that tcpdump shows
> a lot of 'arp who-has' messages.

The offender should have a busy hub/switch light when nobody's doing anything. A
flakey network card or driver will achieve this effect, as a Windows box can be
fooled into demanding an election every time the card hiccups, which may be
every few seconds.

> 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,

Try setting Samba to win all elections.

Try shutting down *all* of the Window machines together.

If you can't fix it in software, and have the equipment to hand, put (a)
switch(es) in the loop and see if that calms things down.

-- 
Linux: The choice of a GNU generation