smbmount - odd behavior

[Jay Stage]

My office is running a RH6.1 box using Samba 2.0.5a.  Two processes (both
shell scripts) running on it go out to a shared resource on a Win95a box.
The mount command that is used is: smbmount \\\\wk01900\\hostprt
/opt/arcdata/wspn -N.  This is issued via a shell script written to
eliminate typing in the entire command.  The script is in a directory that
is included in $PATH.  A file called LOGAIR.DAT is stored on the Win95 box
and is created and updated by a process running on that machine.  It is
unfortunately not possible to change the storage location of this file.  The
first process is called by cron every 15 min that checks LOGAIR.DAT to make
sure that it being updated at least once an hour.  The other, upon finding a
flag that indicates a request, will copy LOGAIR.DAT to an archive dir (on
the Linux box) and then move it to a dir shared via Samba (also on the Linux
box) to be merged into our accounting system.  It runs continuously in a
loop with a sleep 30 command to reduce system load, usually on tty2 under
the appropriate login.

The processes themselves seem to work alright.  But every so often there is
an error message that comes up:

    smb_get_length: recv error = 5
    smb_request: result -5, setting invalid
    smb_retry: new pid=770, generation=2

Despite what the error message says, the PID always remains the same.  It is
the PID associated with smbmount.  The generation increases by 1 every time
the error happens.  At one time the process that copies and then moves the
file was run under the root login.  The shared resource was mounted under
root also.  The only time I saw an error like the one above was if the Win95
box had to be rebooted (at least every couple of days although no-one works
on it directly).  When I changed the processes to run under a different
login (trying to stay away from root) the smbmount command was not running
with UID so I changed it (smbmnt actually) and it seemed to work fine.  Now
the above error comes up multiple times a day.  Does anyone know why this
might be?

Jay Stage
jays at kitt-travel.com
-------------- next part --------------
HTML attachment scrubbed and removed