[Samba] File corruption

[mbc at reisonline.com]

>Now, about once every week or so, we get a file corruption, and last week
(even after
>upgrading some NICs) seemed to be even worse, with 5 or 6 problems.
>Because we had no problems before changing servers, I think hardware errors
>are probably not to blame,

Hi Warren!

	Unfortunately, I don't know that I have a good answer for you, but I
thought I'd share this. We too have been experiencing EXACTLY what you have
described this past two weeks...seemingly random file corruption. We're
running Samba 3 on a RedHat Linux 9.0 box. We temporarily switched to NFS
but that turned out to be more of a nightmare than Samba (for us anyway).
Finally, after googling for hours and posting to this list, we decided to
try and trouble shoot the problem on a lower level the best we knew how.
	There are three main things you can try that might reveal some clues
as to what's going on. Maybe you've tried them already.

1) Use strace to start smbd or attach it to a already running child process.
If you have a general idea of when or under what circumstances these
corruptions occurr, that would be a good time to fire it off because it
spits out a insane amount of data.
2) Turn Samba's log level to 3. Again, do that around the time you think
corruptions may occurr. Logging level 3 is VERY intense on your server and
will definately effect performance.
3) Use ethereal to capture and examine the network traffic. Look through the
SMB packets and see what you can see.

	Of course, all those things really only help if you can reproduce
the problem to some degree. We had our hopes set high on strace, but after
having experienced a known kernel bug, we could not use it. Since we had
spent so much time on the problem, we upgraded to RedHat Enterprise
Edition...all the problems vanished immediately.

Hope this helps a little!

Matthew Connor