[Samba] File Corruption

Scott Sipe cscotts at mindspring.com
Sat Aug 2 03:27:44 GMT 2003


Running FreeBSD 4.8 (and in the past have run versions of FreeBSD on 
this current server going back to 4.3 iirc)

Samba 2.2.8a (in the past have run previous versions)

Computer is a Athlon, with a highpoint raid controller, with 2 WD harddrives

RAID: ar0
Master:  ad4 <WDC WD1200JB-00CRA0/16.06V16> ATA/ATAPI rev 5
Master:  ad6 <WDC WD1200JB-00CRA0/16.06V16> ATA/ATAPI rev 5

The entire system lives on this raid, with about 100GB being shared via 
Samba and Netatalk.  All clients are XP and 2K.

My problem is that, sporadically, files living on the Samba share seem 
to become corrupted.  I've noticed this especially with large installer 
files and large compressed files used by installers.  for instance, I 
was doing network installs of MS Office off the Samba share.  I 
installed Office on two new computers fine, and on the third computer I 
get an error that Office1.cab (a roughly 290MB file) is corrupt.  The 
file changed--I copy it from the CD to the share again and the install 
goes fine the next time i try it.  the md5 of the two files is different 
so I'm absolutely sure that the file definitely changed.  It went 
corrupt again after another install.

As another example, I had a mozilla installer sitting in a directory on 
the share--no one but me would have touched it.  Last used ~1 month ago. 
      Tried it today and it was corrupt.

I personally have only seen corruption in files of this type (installers 
specifically) and am not sure if any other corruption exists.  I've had 
no complaints whnich is a good thing, and we regularly move a large 
volume of files on and off the share via Netatalk (Quark and graphic 
files) and they don't seem to get corrupt either.  PC usage is generally 
less intensive and limited to word files (I'm the only person that would 
be installing stuff off the samba share)

I should note that I don't believe the harddisks are bad--this server 
has been very stable and never goes down except for power outages.  I've 
noticed no corruption in any system files, or any files stored anywhere 
but on this one share.

I should also add that I have a second smaller share (~2GB) on which our 
accounting software runs--due to our accounting software requirements, 
it has all oplocks turned off, and as far as i know there have been no 
corruption issues.

Does anyone have a clue what the problem might be, or what I can test? 
The problem with this is that it IS a sporadic problem, but it's 
happened to me enough times that I'm sure it's real.

thanks much,
Scott




More information about the samba mailing list