Samba problem? Macintosh (Panther) can't see Windows PCs

[Benjamin Scott]

On Jun 1 at 2:55pm, Hewitt Tech wrote:
> I was asked to look into a client's problem where they have a mixed
> environment of fairly new Macs and Windows XP boxes.

   I don't know much about SMB on MacOS X (and nothing at all about recent 
releases), but I've got rather more experience with SMB and Samba then is 
healthy.  Perhaps I can provide some insight.

> Then the Mac got rebooted and after that although the XP box could read 
> shares from the Mac, the Mac can't seem to see the XP box.

   What you are describing is classic SMB peer-to-peer lossage.  SMB really 
really sucks at peer-to-peer networking.  My preferred solution is to create a 
"server" that will be responsible for managing NetBIOS and SMB naming.  This 
doesn't have to be a file server.  Any computer that is always on -- and has 
the needed software -- can be used for this.  In this case, "needed software" 
is Samba or a "server" flavor of Windoze.

   If that's not an option... well, I can walk you through some 
trouble-shooting steps, but they are many and long and cryptic, and the 
trouble tends to be slightly different each time, and there's generally not a 
whole lot you can do to fix things anyway.  You might as well just try 
rebooting computers randomly until everything starts working again.  All the 
trouble-shooting steps do is tell you which computers to try rebooting first.

   Again, SMB really really sucks in peer-to-peer mode.  With a lot of 
tweaking, you can make it only really suck (instead of really really sucking).

> I know that the Mac uses Samba 3.x but I was a bit confused as to how Samba 
> client works on a Mac.  The only daemon I saw running was smbd.

   smbd is the Samba server, of course.  If you're trying to connect to another 
server, your local smbd doesn't really get involved.

   SMB client implementation as an in-kernel filesystem is really a kernel 
issue.  While the Samba people created the Linux smbfs stuff, in practice it 
belongs to the kernel, not Samba.  I believe *BSD has their own smbfs, 
independent of Samba and Linux.  I expect Apple's BSD-derived OS either uses 
that, or Apple's own code.  Practical upshot: I suspect Samba isn't going to 
apply much here.

-- 
Ben <dragonhawk at iname.com>