rsync to a Samba/CIFS filessytem hangs

[Paul Slootman]

On Thu 14 Jul 2005, Robert Gasch wrote:
> 
> I'm using rsync to backup a Linux Mandrake 10.1 (kernel 2.6.10) ext3
> filesystem (+- 5GB of content, lots of little files) to a CIFS
> filesystem mounted with samba 3.0.10. The exact invocation of rsync
> is:

The CIFS filesystem is mounted on the linux system? Then samba doesn't
really enter the picture. On what system is the CIFS filesystem located?
Could you show the output of 'mount'?

> /usr/local/bin/rsync -v -a --copy-links --delete /var/www /mnt/backup/backup_www
> 
> Using the system provided rsync 2.6.3 and a self-compiled 2.6.5 this
> process runs for a while and then simply hangs. What's even worse,

Did you try using strace? Does lsof -p $pid show anything?

> when I try to kill the job, the process becomes owned by pid 1, can't
> be killed anymore and thus the memory it holds doesn't get released
> anymore (forcing me to reboot the machine about once a month or so).

It becomes a zombie process. It should be reaped by init (pid 1),
however for some reason init doesn't seem to be doing its work...
A zombie process only holds an entry in the process table so that it can
return its exit status to its parent (who hasn't waited for its child
yet). It shouldn't take up any memory or other resources...

The output from strace and lsof would be helpful.
However, my impression is that the CIFS filesystem is deadlocking
somewhere...


Paul Slootman