I have two (2) Linux machines running on a network inside my house. They are both using Samba 3.0.2a. One is running Mandrake 10 and I have set it up to be the local and domain master browser for the network. The other machine is running Gentoo. There are a few other machines on the network that run WinXP. All machines belong to the same workgroup.

My problem is that the the Gentoo machine never appears in Network Neighborhood for the Windows machines, and never appears in the specifed workgroup in LinNeighborhood or smb4k. In fact, the Gentoo machine never appears on its own, regardless of how the network is searched. I can configure smb4k to scan the entire network for machines, or tell it to simply query the master browser for a list of machines on the network. Smb4k does see the Mandrake machine to be the workgroup master and I have checked nmbd logs to verify that it is acting as the master browser. So, the Gentoo machine does not appear on its own, but I search for the it by netbios name in smb4k, it then appears with the correct workgroup name in brackets. I can then add it to the workgroup list, but it only remains there so long as smb4k continues to run.

This isn't a big problem, as I can still type \\sauron into Explorer on the Windows machines and view the shares and can search for it in smb4k, but I would like to get it working correctly in case I would ever need to know how to do this for some other network I may work on in the future.