Samba: Change of IP address isn't taken into account


April 2010.
Symptom:

Doing a node status request to the domain master browser at IP [old_ip] failed

Explanation:

The following is an example of a problem we see from time to time:

"Samba was working fine. We had to change the IP address of the Samba server.
Following the change Samba does not work. We have tried EVERYTHING - it still
does not work!"

What to check:
--------------
1) Follow all instructions in DIAGNOSIS.txt from the samba docs directory.
2) Locate you browse.dat and wins.dat files. They may be found in the following
typical locations:
/usr/local/samba/var/locks
/var/locks/samba
/opt/samba/var/locks
If you can not locate where samba stores these files you can always run:
testparm | grep lock
3) Shut down samba.
4) Delete the browse.dat and wins.dat files
5) Restart samba.
6) Check that any files you deleted have been recreated.
7) Now follow DIAGNOSIS.txt again.

Cause:
------
Samba will place into these files entries for itself with your old IP
address. When you restart Samba it preloads it's name cache with this
information and expects to be able to resolve it's own address to the
same address as it has just read from these files.

Deleting the files means samba takes a little longer to stabilize on
startup but otherwise will now operate correctly.

In Samba 2.0 this problem has been fixed properly by storing signature
information in the relevant files.

Source:

* http://www.jalix.org/ressources/reseaux/nfs-samba/samba/_docs/faq.html#6