[ale] samba <> Master Browser

[jcpilman at gmail.com (jcpilman at gmail.com)]

This may be old news to most of you, but I just found out.

Our network at the office is a Windows Workgroup. So when I installed
Ubuntu 10.04 and started using samba at the office, my computer became
the Domain Master Browser. (Don't be tricked by the ambiguity of the
word 'domain' in this context.) This caused some grief for the Windows
users here, because my computer is not always on the network. So I
made the following changes to the defaults in /etc/samba/smb.conf

domain master = no
local master = no
preferred master = no

Of course, you sometimes want the Linux box to be master.

The documentation is pretty good about explaining why this works;
although, it did not mean much to me until I saw it in action.
http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/NetworkBrowsing.html


...John