SMBD's go into "D" (uninteruptable sleep) and never wake up

[Bryan J. Smith]

Mike Rylander wrote:
> I had this problem a while back.  Running 2.0.7 as a
> simple workgroup server, I had a large amount of storage
> mounted via NFS and shared via Samba,

Which is not exactly recommended -- unless you have Samba running on
the same, remote server you are NFS mounting from and utilize NIS
automounter maps.  But yes, I have done this too (to avoid paying
NetApp $7K for a CIFS license ;-).

> and from time to time I would need to reboot the server
> to get rid of D-wait'd processes.

Reboot the server?  Or just the daemons/service?
[ Note:  I'm coming at this blind.  I just joined the list and am
not familiar with this "D" state you speak of. ]

> As soon as I moved the most heavily accessed shares (the
> [homes] shares) to one big box and shared them directly
> (as opposed to via NFS) every thing was fine.  As far as
> I can, this is a problem with state management in Linux's
> NFS driver.  One note, I did have greater success with two
> Solaris machines smb-sharing via NFS (of course, right?).

Linux's NFS services are still maturing.  I had 0 issues once I
upgraded to Trond+Higgens NFS v3 for kernel 2.2 (using VALinux's
2.2.16 kernel).  Linux 2.4 is more on-par with Solaris in NFS-SMB
locking at the kernel level from what I can tell (disclaimer:  I'm
just playing with Samba 2.2 now).

-- TheBS

-- 
Bryan "TheBS" Smith         chat:thebs413 @AOL/MSN/Yahoo
Engineer                       mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org
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