network issues with MS Windows

Hi -does anyone have similar issue.
I have a small home network with a Pogoplug v4 and two re-installed winXP's and and a win7 machine. The Pogoplug v4 is the a3 version, uboot is updated; I'm using the Debian--5.2.9 root disk with the update kernel 5.6.5.

All seems to work well; I can ssh into it and it seems to work fine, but.....
My windows network goes down; the shared disks and computers are not seen between window computers any more. At first I thought it was an issue with the samba server -but it continues to prevent my window machines from seeing each other, even after I 'apt-get remove samba' (I saw comments that the samba smbd and nmbd servers were stopped and removed). After many tries over a few months I noticed that the windows network worked fine only if I unplugged the pogoplug network cable.

I have a verizon router; there seems to be no ip address conflict..
Again, the 3 window machines share their disks well, but only if the pogoplug is unplugged (samba or no samba)

The pogoplug is not setup to share anything by NFS or other.

And many thanks to the wonderful guidance in this forum; Thanks in Advance

dancyran,

> After many tries over a few
> months I noticed that the windows network worked
> fine only if I unplugged the pogoplug network
> cable.
>
> I have a verizon router; there seems to be no ip
> address conflict..
> Again, the 3 window machines share their disks
> well, but only if the pogoplug is unplugged (samba
> or no samba)

1. Check your /etc/resolv.conf. See what domain is in there. When you use dynamic IP address for the Pogo V4, the domain should be stored in this file automatically. If you use static IP, this file doesnot have domain, just the your router as nameserver (eg. 192.168.0.1).

2. Check your /etc/samba/smb.conf. And make sure it is not domain master. You want your Windows machine to be the domain master. So make sure:

# Domain Master specifies Samba to be the Domain Master Browser. If this
# machine will be configured as a BDC (a secondary logon server), you
# must set this to 'no'; otherwise, the default behavior is recommended.
#   domain master = auto
    domain master = no

So reinstall Samba on Pogo V4. Run it with "domain master = no" in smb.conf.

-bodhi
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Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/18/2020 10:56PM by bodhi.

root@debian:/etc# cat resolv.conf
domain home
search home
nameserver 192.168.1.1


I still think there's network weirdness -as I am not able to access (from my win7 laptop) one of the two winXP's (but other accesses well at this time). I was able to do this just before re-installing the cat5 wire. I have an old Actionteck MI424WR-gen3I router that otherwise seems to work well

The debian box has no samba running; the residual smb.conf file has notation for 'server role = standalone server' -but I will declare domain master = no. I did use the testing version of samba these past few months.

I know enough -to know that I don't know samba. I came across microsoft 'experts' that noted network issues with dozen of recommendations to check or reset. Sorry for any slow turn-around as I can only spend a few short trouble shoots per week.

dancyran,

Samba is such a mess that we have to live with when there are Windows boxes in the network. Here is just a guess:

You might want to run Samba on Pogo V4 plug so that it announces to the network that it is now a non-master. Samba has database might still have old info.

-bodhi
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filezilla! or bitvise! both work well off ssh.

Echowarrior108

device: pogoplug-pro v3

Currently running:
Debian GNU/Linux Bullseye 12-9-22
Linux 5.4.224-oxnas-tld-1 armv6l GNU/Linux 11-27-22