Linux OpenVPN client cannot access Samba on LOCAL LAN

Question

I have a small network with both Windows and Linux machines. The Windows machines have shared folders on them which I can access using Samba from the Linux machines.

I recently connected one of my Linux machines to a VPN using OpenVPN. When the VPN is connected, I can still ping the local Windows machines by IP address, but I cannot access the shared folders any more --- the samba client times out.

Has anyone got a similar setup to work?

Answer 1

Tracing things through with wireshark, it turned out that the VPN was pushing through the OpenDNS DNS servers, which never return "not found". The Linux samba client was doing a DNS lookup prior to a NetBIOS lookup, and so was "finding" the machines on the OpenDNS "no domain here" servers rather than the local network.

Changing the VPN's DNS settings to use Google's DNS servers instead fixed the problem, as did changing the Samba config to avoid DNS lookups by adding

name resolve order = wins lmhosts bcast
dns proxy = no

to /etc/samba/smb.conf