Force Server to win the Windows browser election

Feb 27, '03 09:46:00AM

Contributed by: XactSystems

When installing an OSX Server at client locations that required serving to PC's as well as Macs, I ran into problems with PC's winning the browser election instead of the server. Now traditional SAMBA expertise would say that setting the OS level high (like 65 or so) would cause the machine to win the election. But this is no longer true with Win2000 and XP. A Win2000 machine will trump Samba or Win98 regardless of OS level. An XP machine will trump everything else too.

So to solve this you need to edit the registry on the PC's. Here is how I solved it.

On the PCs, go to the "run" command and type in "regedit", then go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE -> SYSTEM -> CurrentControlSet -> Services -> Browser -> Parameters. There are a couple of settings to look at. The results of these settings can be weird sometimes, so you may have to experiment. The two items to look at are IsDomainMaster and MaintainServerList. Microsoft has a good article on it. The basic settings are:

IsDomainMaster = TRUE or FALSE
MaintainServerList = No, Yes, Auto
By default, the workstation should say:
IsDomainMaster = FALSE
MaintainServerList = AUTO
However, I've seen it other things, and I've seen workstations override domain controllers in the elections. For the machines you want to be master (for your OSX server to win the election, NONE of them can be master), set them to TRUE and YES. For the others, leave them at FALSE and AUTO.

If you find a machine that keeps taking over as master, set it to FALSE and NO. We tried setting all the workstations to FALSE and NO and we then ended up with erratic browse listings. So we set them back to FALSE and AUTO.

[robg adds: Sorry, no value add on this one from me (and I hope I didn't introduce any errors while editing it!), but I hope this helps those of you that may have experienced this problem...]

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