I'm not 100% sure but you may need to keep that port open. Windows 2000 servers host SMB on IP by using TCP and UDP port 445 (Common Internet File System). Win2k clients send connection requests to ports 139 and 445 at the same time to establish communication. When talking to NT servers, clients default to 139 and Win2k uses 445. I don't know how many WINS server are out there, but by default they have a TTL of 6 days, but systems also cache some NetBios entries for a while. Aaron Brubaker AIS -----Original Message----- From: Steve Devine [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Wednesday, March 19, 2003 11:08 AM To: [log in to unmask] Subject: Wins and samba hostname discovery All: We manage the public afs rotary (afs.msu.edu). This rotary is comprised of 12 separate unix servers running samba as well as other services. When we need to patch a server we ask Hostmaster to remove it from the dns rotary. This doesn't seem to accomplish much however because even with these machines out of the rotary the isolated server still gets multiple requests for samba service. We recently had three out for several days and the minute we put them back on line they were serving samba requests even though they still were out of the rotary. So here are my questions: Are there multiple wins servers on campus and how do they refresh themselves? When we remove machines from the afs.msu.edu rotary should I post to this list? Can /do these wins servers use dns for hostname discovery? On a separate issue can someone tell me if port 445 needs to be used for day-to-day SMB filesharing? We would just as soon firewall that off. Thanks .. -- Steve Devine Core Systems Michigan State University 110 Computer Center East Lansing, MI 48824-1042 1-517-355-4500 (x242)