Windows users suddenly unable to mount smb shares
 

I can't mount samba shares from one of my servers. I have rebooted pcs and I've tried to disconnect and reconnect the samba shares - same message every time:

An error occurred while reconnecting M to \\yadda\yadda
Microsoft Windows Network 2220. The group name could not be found.

I've googled this msg - MS windows site says this is a network problem.


***********************
Problem determination so far:


I have restarted smbd, nmbd, and winbindd. They shutdown and restarted again with out error messages.

The smb.conf file for this server has not been modified since 2007(I checked the time stamps.)

I have verified that I can ssh to the server and that all the files are there, not too full and the mount points in fstab are intact too.

I also pinged using ip and name and it worked - responding with correct info (names and ip address) each time.

Group names are fine, both on PCs and in the smb.conf file.

All PCs are exhibiting the same problem.

********************

Are there any tools out there that will help isolate this? Could NIS have anything to do with this? I'm not getting any errors about permissions or passwords - doesn't that rule out NIS? (the only reason I'd mention NIS is that the NIS server crashed on Monday - though it is back on line now).

Thoughts and suggestions requested.

Thanks

Well, is NIS involved in authentication? Did this problem start on Monday? Has anything else changed about your Linux/Samba server?

My suggestions would be to:

1) check the samba logs (if you haven't already) for clues.
2) Verify connectivity to any Windows DC's that may be acting as a password server.
3) make sure no Windows GPO's have been added or changed that would effect windoze firewall behavior.

I only discovered the problem this morning. Last time anyone used the apps on this server (that require samba) was as far back as 3 weeks.

Recently half our servers crashed - NIS was one of the services that went down.

Everything has been recovered.

The server that I'm working on was *not* on of the servers that crashed.

The only other thing that has changed in the past 3 weeks were changes to dhcpd and dns - but I think I've ruled those out as problems as I can ping using both the network ip number and the dns name.

I checked the logs just now. (Thanks for that thought - I don't know why I didn't). And you were right, it did provide the group name and it was *not* the name I thought it was looking for. So now I'm pretty sure it was NIS.

In the meantime, I just now rebooted the server that has the samba issue (now that the users have gone home). Surprise. surprise. -- when it came back up, it worked. I can now map it's drives.

There must be a configuration problem as this is the only server that had this problem. The other servers, the servers that did not crash, did not lose their brains when NIS went down. I leaning towards NIS because the logs called out a group name that is defined in NIS.

Thanks to both of you - for your thoughts and help.

No problem...that's what the community is here for. Come back and field some questions for others....:)

I'm glad to be of some use finally. :-)