2006-09-30 hypertwins network issues

Overview

Latest network issues from The Hypertwins:

• Bunsen resolves correct IP address for Gonzo via ping, nmblookup, and net lookup, but browsing smb://gonzo shows bunsen's shares instead.

  This is after a complete shutdown/restart, after which I found that the lisa daemon wasn't running, and had to start it by hand.

  I couldn't figure out why lisa didn't run automatically because the Red Hat services GUI app wouldn't run. I don't know how else to check what things are supposed to run automatically at bootup.

  Also... smbtree on Bunsen showed the correct shares for Gonzo. So it's not Samba, but somewhere between Konqueror and Samba.

• Floyd shows everything messed-up, but can't reboot Floyd at the moment because he's running things which need to stay connected.
• Looking at the network from two other machines (one win98 and one Ubuntu), everything looks as it should.

There was one glitch I fixed earlier, which was that gonzo had an entry in /etc/hosts to return 128.0.1.1 for "gonzo". After I fixed that, Bunsen started working again, but only for a little bit.

Part 2

[woozle@Bunsen ~]$ nslookup gonzo
Server:         192.168.0.254
Address:        192.168.0.254#53

Name:   gonzo
Address: 127.0.0.1
Name:   gonzo
Address: 127.0.1.1
Name:   gonzo
Address: 192.168.0.254

This is part of the problem. Bunsen is getting two localhost addresses for gonzo, in addition to the correct address. Other machines are also getting those three addresses, but with the correct one first; apparently that makes a difference. A guess: this shows that the problem is at the dnsmasq level, because otherwise nmblookup would have also been showing problems. nslookup is at the domain-name level, which is outside of Samba.

Solution

• Modify /etc/hosts so there are no references to gonzo ("localhost" addresses are ok and belong there).
• restart samba: /etc/init.d/samba restart
• restart dnsmasq: /etc/init.d/dnsmasq restart
• type nslookup gonzo on any affected machines:

[root@Bunsen ~]# nslookup gonzo
Server:         192.168.0.254
Address:        192.168.0.254#53

Name:   gonzo
Address: 192.168.0.254

Another Glitch

For some reason, Gonzo stopped responding to nmblookup, i.e. other machines couldn't see him, even though they could still ping him by name. It turned out that Gonzo's nmbd somehow got started under my regular-user account instead of by root; killing that process and then restarting Samba (as root; /etc/init.d/samba restart) fixed the problem.