Samba won't dance (more info)

[Claude Jones]

On Monday April 14 2008 4:04:39 pm Craig White wrote:
> I'm sure Fedora can and will do that but you have to figure
> out why it's not doing that.
>

Yes, but it doesn't do it out of the box - never has since FC1 
which is where I started

> WINS requires broadcasts...
>
> so if all your systems are on 192.168.2.0 network and they all
> have a 255.255.255.0 subnet mask, and they are not blocking
> broadcast or NETBIOS ports (137, 138, 139 & 445) by virtue of
> a firewall it all should work as planned.
>

All the above conditions are met. The PCLinuxOS disk is on a 
computer that's getting its address from the same router as all 
the other machines. It's coming up on livecd practically 
working - I only had to tell it what NIC to use to find the 
network connection. 

> The broadcast address for 192.168.2.0 / subnet mask
> 255.255.255.0 is 192.168.2.255
>

Yes, I do know this

> If your Fedora box is on a different network, a different
> subnet mask or the firewall blocks one of those ports, all
> bets are off.

The Fedora box is not on a different network, that's the whole 
point of my PCLinuxOS experiment -- subnet masks are also the 
same, and though the firewall on the Fedora box is correctly 
configured, I also turned it off completely to make sure it 
wasn't the cuprit. I also found selinux messages related to smb 
and nmb traffic being blocked, and tried running the suggested 
remedy-commands AND, subsequently, putting selinux in permissive 
mode, but to no avail. 

Fedora's Samba implementation is no two-stepper...

But, I want to understand why -- if there's a reason it has to be 
this way, so be it, but I'm on a mission to figure out what 
causes the problem, in great detail, so I can just fix it 
without having to resort to the triad (google, man, list) in the 
future...
-- 
Claude Jones
Brunswick, MD, USA