[Samba] "valid userse = @anyGroup" breaks samba

[Peter Schüller]

Hello,

first of all, thanks to everyone who has responded to my questions lately. All 
pointers are as always much appreciated.

That said, I have now narrowed down (and solved, sort of) the problem with the 
mysterious "freeze effect"[1] I've been posting about. To put it in short 
terms:

X = original smb.conf that's worked fine for a long time up until a power 
outtage efter which we started having the "freeze" problems
Y = X, except all occurrences of "valid users = ..." commented out.

Y works, X does not. That is, when I switch to Y and restart samba, I can no 
longer reproduce the freeze effect.

The long story is that as part of debugging this problem we set up a new samba 
instance in a chroot on the same server. At first it appeared that it worked 
perfectly, while the real instance would exhibit the freeze problems even 
with a as-vanilla-as-possible configuration. 

After awhile, I thought the problelm on the real instance had mysteriously 
solved itself, when we were testing a vanilla-ish configuration on it. But 
then, after having copied back some of the real share configurations, the 
problem came back.

We eventually narroed it down such that we were able to reproduce the problem 
with the "test share" having a specific definition, and not with a slighty 
modified one. Here's the exact definition of the "public" share we have, in 
working order:

[Public]
        path = /home/samba/public
        public = no
;       valid users = @melacure
        force group = melacure
        force create mode = 0770
        force directory mode = 0770
        writable = yes
        printable = no

Now, if I remove the semi-colon on the valid users line, the login script 
(which maps this drive among others) will start hanging when mapping this 
particular drive (not always, but perhaps 1/3 of the time). Similarly, if I 
leave it commented out but have other drives with a "valid users" statement, 
it will hang on those drives, but not others.

I mention this because logging in repeatedly and seeing if the login script 
hangs is the one consistently working way we have had of reproducing the 
freeze effect, but in practice it occurs when logged in aswell, but seemingly 
more randomly.

We have not yet had time to try "valid users" statements listing specific 
users and no groups...

In any case, it seems like a very weird thing to cause these problems (no 
wonder we had trouble figuring it out). I really don't know what conclusions 
to draw from this. If anyone is enlightened by this information, please share 
:)

[1] Basically, the client will freeze every now and then, hanging explorer 
(i.e. the desktop, start menu, etc) until it becomes "unstuck" 20-40 seconds 
or so later. Sometimes even the task manager cannot be brought up when this 
happens. These freezes happens every now and then when accessing network 
shares, and also when the login script runs during login (but not as often / 
consistently if the same script is manually run after login). This happens 
quite often on all 30-40 client computers on the network ever since a power 
outtage and reboot of the server.

-- 
/ Peter Schuller, InfiDyne Technologies HB

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