Add Windows 7 PC to Samba Domain after IP address change
2013
Today, I had to change all IP addresses on a customers Samba network. (Really, the customer had two separate networks, and I have unified them to one).
After this, I had to add several Windows 7 PCs to the Samba domain, but the process failed, and the logs on the Samba server had no entries on this.
The error message was:
“The specified domain either does not exist or could not be contacted”
I had added the registry entries specified here:
wiki.samba.org/index.php/Registry_changes_for_NT4-style_domains
but nothing.
Finally, the nblookup tool downloadable from Microsofts website pointed me in the right direction: incorrect wins data!
The solution was simple:
/etc/init.d/samba stop
rm /var/lib/samba/wins.*
/etc/init.d/samba start
This recreated the correct wins database wins.tdb and the PC could be joined to the database.