[PLUG] the struggle for coexistance

[Derek Loree]

This is a little story about the struggle to understand the workings of
the brains in Redmond.  It starts with a linux server called
"newserver".  This server is being set up to be transported off to do
some real good in the world.  The lowly test technician has just set up
Samba.  He changes the workgroup name to "WG", he makes the home
directories writable, and then he creates a common share called "share"
and makes it writable.  After running the command 

/etc/init.d/samba restart

the server starts with no complaints.

Now the fun starts, the lowly tech then goes to an XP (pro edition)
machine to test the newly started samba server.  "Where the hell is the
workgroup browsing link", he screams, "all I get with the Network
browsing button is the last share I logged into, I know the network is
bigger than that!"  After intense searching, the Workgroup browse link
suddenly appears in a spot that had been thoroughly searched before.

"Whew", he says, "now lets see if we can find the "WG" workgroup.  Ah,
there it is, but nothing is in it!"  Having seen this before, the lowly
tech then changed the XP's workgroup to "WG", did the mandatory reboot
and finally found newserver.

Now, lurking in the background is another server called "bigserv" in
another workgroup called "shop".  This server is also running bind with
an experimental gforge  install.  During the installation, the zone file
for shop was heavily modified, including a wildcard entry that points to
bigserv.

So, lowly tech logs into newserver, got the username and password
prompt, and then was shown a list of shares.  But wait, there is
something fishy about those shares.  Those are the share on bigserv!  He
confirmed this by going into his home directory, sure enough, that is
the home directory on bigserv, not the nice clean directory of the fresh
new newserver.

After the wildcard entry was deleted, the XP box did log into the
correct server, but the lesson had been learned!  You can't trust
anything that XP tells you about the network, particularly the name of
the server that you are logging into!

Thanks for letting me vent.

Derek Loree