Weird Samba PDC action (and disappearing LDAP database)

[Kevin Myer]

Hello,

I would like to see if anyone else has had similar experiences with Samba
and LDAP and perhaps have someone offer a better explanation for a problem
I had this morning.

Running Samba (HEAD CVS version) on a dual Pentium II 300Mhz, 512Mb RAM,
Red Hat Linux 5.2, kernel 2.2.10, software raid5 (not for boot disk
though).

Has worked like a champ for some light use over the summer.  I encountered
a few problems when school started but nothing major until this morning.

We are predominately Macintosh but have about 65 PC's running Windows NT
4.0 with Service Pack 5.  50 of these are business education machines
which normally stay on all the time.  9 of these are library media center
machines which are normally turned off at the end of the day.

Everything was working this morning until the first machine in the library
was turned on and someone attempted to login (6:53am).  Shortly
thereafter, one of the Business Ed machines ended up winnning a master
browser election (6:56am).  At 6:59am, the Samba server regained control
of the domain and at 7:06, syslog stopped logging.  Also, at 7:06am, the
last modification was made to my LDAP database file.  Of about eight
files, 6 had totally disappeared this morning when I got to work, one had
a modification time stamp of 7:06am and the other was an empty file.

I have heard problems of file corruption with 2.2.X kernels - maybe thats
what I'm seeing.  I find it very coincidental that strange stuff happened
with Samba (at least strange to me, like having the workstation win the
master browser election) and then after that, everything stopped working.
I've included what logs I have from Samba below from the time frame I
described above.  Perhaps someone can conjecture as to what happened.

I don't think it was a hack, although it always could be.  There's no
evidence of that in anything I've looked at.  But it seems something nasty
happened in a ten minute time frame and I don't know whether to blame
Samba, OpenLDAP or the kernel itself.  I did have a recent backup of the
ldif file used for the LDAP databases so it wasn't too hard to recreate
but I've got to get to the bottom of this if I can.

Thanks.

Sep  8 06:53:38 gneiss smbd[30804]: [1999/09/08 06:53:38, 0]
smbd/uid.c:become_root(370)
Sep  8 06:53:38 gneiss smbd[30804]:   ERROR: become root depth is non zero
Sep  8 06:53:38 gneiss smbd[30804]: [1999/09/08 06:53:38, 0]
smbd/uid.c:unbecome_root(391)
Sep  8 06:53:38 gneiss smbd[30804]:   ERROR: unbecome root depth is 0
Sep  8 06:53:47 gneiss smbd[30804]: [1999/09/08 06:53:47, 0]
smbd/nttrans.c:call_nt_transact_ioctl(1504)
Sep  8 06:53:47 gneiss smbd[30804]:   call_nt_transact_ioctl: Currently
not implemented.
Sep  8 06:53:53 gneiss smbd[30804]: [1999/09/08 06:53:53, 0]
smbd/service.c:make_connection(215)
Sep  8 06:53:53 gneiss smbd[30804]:   lmc02 (172.20.2.52) couldn't find
service lmc
Sep  8 06:56:23 gneiss nmbd[21635]: [1999/09/08 06:56:23, 0]
nmbd/nmbd_incomingdgrams.c:process_local_master_announce(309)
Sep  8 06:56:23 gneiss nmbd[21635]:   process_local_master_announce:
Server BE017 at IP 172.20.3.229 is announcing itself as a local master
for workgroup ELANCO and we think we are master. Forcing election.
Sep 8 06:56:23 gneiss nmbd[21635]: [1999/09/08 06:56:23, 0]
nmbd/nmbd_become_lmb.c:unbecome_local_master_success(156)
Sep  8 06:56:23 gneiss nmbd[21635]:   *****
Sep  8 06:56:23 gneiss nmbd[21635]:
Sep  8 06:56:23 gneiss nmbd[21635]:   Samba name server GNEISS has stopped
being a local master browser for workgroup ELANCO on subnet 172.20.0.99
Sep  8 06:56:23 gneiss nmbd[21635]:
Sep  8 06:56:23 gneiss nmbd[21635]:   *****
Sep  8 06:59:24 gneiss nmbd[21635]: [1999/09/08 06:59:24, 0]
nmbd/nmbd_become_lmb.c:become_local_master_stage2(406)
Sep  8 06:59:24 gneiss nmbd[21635]:   *****
Sep  8 06:59:24 gneiss nmbd[21635]:
Sep  8 06:59:24 gneiss nmbd[21635]:   Samba name server GNEISS is now a
local master browser for workgroup ELANCO on subnet 172.20.0.99
Sep  8 06:59:24 gneiss nmbd[21635]:
Sep  8 06:59:24 gneiss nmbd[21635]:   *****


-- 
     ~        Kevin M. Myer
    . .       Network/System Administrator
    /V\       ELANCO School District
   // \
  /(   )\
   ^`~'^