[Samba] Trouble connecting to Samba shares from other Linux boxes

[Brandon Laing]

Hey list,

I'm having some problems with a few of my Fedora Core 2 boxes. 1 of the systems is set up as a Samba Server as the main fileserver. I
have some Windows XP machines connecting to it just fine, nice and fast. However, I also have some FC2 systems that connect to it using
the smbfs filesystem, and while they work initially after booting up, any amount of browsing through Nautilus or trying to run some
programs off of the network will cause the system to hang. Not lock up, as I can force close windows, but the system will not respond to
anything else. It definitely appears to be an issue with Samba however, and only when connecting from another FC2 system. Also, if the
client system does hang while browsing the share, if I open a terminal window and try to do anything, I will sometimes get an error like
this: 

error: failed to stat: /mnt: Input/output error

Now, I'm thinking that this is only happening on the new version of Samba, 3.0.7-2.FC2 or 3.0.7-2.FC1. I noticed this started to happen last week on the 15th, after a system auto-updated to the newest version. Shortly after, other FC and FC2 boxes started having connection troubles. So, to test this, I set up a new system and didn't update samba on it. Sure enough, works perfectly, no hang ups. Ok, so I'll try the newest version directly from samba.org, 3.0.7-1 on the server. Hangs up within a minute of browsing on that one, same as the 3.0.7-2.FC2 release.

So, this really seems to be a bug in the most recent release of Samba. I've tried multiple, freshly installed servers and clients now, and can always reproduce this error. It's making things very difficult for us as well, as we have multiple servers that communicate via Samba that suddenly aren't working after they update. Luckily, Windows boxes are not effected by this and are connecting to Samba machines just fine. 

So, has anyone else experienced this, or know of any potential workarounds? I can post smb.conf files if need be, although I'm using pretty much all defaults and am just setting up simple shares. This setup has been working now for over a year without a hitch. 

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Brandon