[Kate]

Our network is constantly visited by Windows users and there is much traffic with wireless laptops of all kinds. Each of them leaves traces of its Windows workgroup in all connected Macs under the Finders network entry.

When I do an extensive cache cleaning of all those Macs these entries are removed, but this is not a good technique of getting rid of those workgroup folders, since you loose all caches with probably valuable data in some.

These network entries are cached somewhere but I have not found yet where they get stored. Any hints?

[Kate]

There is more nuisance in the Finder's and Mac OS X's network and network browsing features. This is a mixed environment, SMB/CIFS AppleTalk etc. are causing traffic and some older Macs are online as well. And here's the bad news: On all Mac OS X machines the shares of the Mac OS 9 machines vanish from sight as soon as SMB ist activated in DirectoryServices.

The Mac OS X Server server is able to see all of them. All those SMB shares, all Mac OS 9 (afp) shares and all Mac OS X shares (afp over TCP). Why cannot the Mac OS X machines? It is a mystery!!

I stumbled across this today, I've never seen this before. I am digging for SMB hints now.
Why the presence of SMB prevents ATALK machines from being seen....

Interconnectivity..here we go....

Anybody living in a mixed environment as well with some insight?

[SMacTech]

The problem is OS X cannot see OS 9 shares when SMB is turned on?

I share OS X files to my XP box, my XP box is sharing files too. The OS 9 iMac can access OS X shared files and OS X can see XP. But I don't share any files via OS 9. I will try this and see if it is a bug or quasi-feature.

Why do you use OS 9 to share files? Just curious.

[Kate]

I am running an old PowerMac to work as an ISDN Router and ISDN FileTransfer agent. It can only run OS 9.
And for compatibility reasons the FileMaker database is also served from an OS9 machine.

Both vanish from the network under all X machines but the server when SMB gets activated. At least this is so eveywhere I tested this.

Not only do the Macs fight each other during the "election" process when SMB is on about who is the MasterBrowser , this is also sometimes the cause for losing all browsing abilities at all, even the afp shares are lost.

I have tried to change the smb browsing and smb config to avoid this by inserting these lines

[ global]
domain master = no
preferred master = no

into the /etc/smb.conf and var/run/smbbrowsing.conf .

I must say this did not change much. So far my experience is mixed and inconsistent. When I make an alias of one of the OS9 Macs and use this it sometimes works when the share is not appearing. Usually the "connect to::" feature of the Finder and connecting via the network in a Finder window do fail both consistently.

I switch off SMB and BANG, both systems appear and can be reached by either method.

I'll see what an extensive network scan of all protocols may show when this happens.

[SMacTech]

While I don't have the same setup here, I cannot replicate the OS 9 share loss when using SMB on OS 10.3 client.

What is the smb server?

OS 9 offers AFP over IP file sharing, do you not have this enabled ? You stated AFP only.

[Kate]

Yes, afp over IP is enabled. FWIW, there is one single machine besides the server that sees them all, even with SMB enabled.

I'm going to reapply the 10.3.7 combo updater just in case the updates were causing this.

The SMB Server is a Mac OS X Server, and there is a single Windows XP PC as well that has a share, which in fact is the sole cause for having SMB set to on at all.

[SMacTech]

Possibly there is a problem in the workgroup names in the SMB configuration? I assume that is XP Pro. These are all on the same subnet?

You mentioned domain config. Does the XP box authenticate to the OS X server?

I am picking at straws here. Without an identical config, it maybe tough to troubleshoot and from what you are saying, even then it is a gamble. I googled and could not find others with a similar problem.

[Kate]

Yes, these are all on the same subnet. The Macs were first all in the same workgroup, but some did loose all network browsing ability when they were trying to be part of the same group. So I switched all these to have their own workgroup, e.g. Mac1 has workgroup Mac1, Mac2 gets workgroup Mac2 and so on. The PC has workgroup PC.

The PC runs XP Pro . The pc and its workgroupname can be seen from all Macs. The Mac OS X Server runs SMB and AFP services to share files. The files served by SMB appear under the same workgroup like the PC, where the server name is "FileServerPC". Files served through AFP are seen under the server name "FileServerMac".

Generally in the Finders network directory you can see the workgroup "PC" that shows two members, "PC" and "FileServerPC". Then there is the group "Local" that shows all the AFP Macs with shares and were the AppleTalk/AFP-over-IP Mac OS 9 machines should appear.
There are four PowerMacs that do not see these there. The server still sees them and there is a single PM that sees them as well.

The Macs where the OS9 machines are missing under the network directory are all running 10.3.7 just like the rest.

[Kate]

Interesting new findings. Since FileMaker automatically detects network protocols as a fallback mechanism, it switches to classic afp when afp over tcp fails. This causes all FileMaker clients to exchange data at a slow rate, and the switch to slow rates happens every day now. Only restarting the FM Mac brings it back to normal for a limited amount of time.

I'll see what more happens there tomorrow.