FreeBSD + samba 2.2.2 problems; semi-solution

[Mike Silbersack]

On Mon, 21 Jan 2002, David W. Chapman Jr. wrote:

> > In any case the following indicates FreeBSD may already have a fix, and
> you
> > could try it soon:
> >
>
> I believe Mike is running -current, but we do believe its a problem with
> FreeBSD.  I on the other hand haven't really seen this problem since FreeBSD
> 4.3.  Very Strange.

Well, to wrap up this thread, here's what I've found:

The TCP checksum corruption which is causing connections to stall and
samba to hang seems to be the result of a hardware problem on my Duron
system; if I move the harddrive with my -current installation over to the
Celeron system, the problem goes away.  If I move the -stable harddrive
from the Celeron over to the Duron, the problem appears.

There is a fix for the known Via IDE data corruption bug, and it is being
applied to my system.  However, it does not seem to fix the problem I am
experiencing.  I've done searches, and there are no reports of similar
corruption occuring during data transfer from a PCI NIC to the ram.
However, since this is so subtle, others may have not analyzed the problem
close enough to figure out what's going on.

As for explaining how my symptoms appear to be similar to the symptoms of
other Samba users... I suspect that others are experiencing the samba
blocked on a read problem I was experiencing, or something similar.
The root cause of the problem is probably different for those users, but
the result (samba blocking endlessly) is probably the same.

So, it looks like FreeBSD was never at fault in this situation.  Changing
Samba so that it does not use blocking reads w/o a timeout is probably a
good change for reliability, but it can't fix my hardware corruption
problem.

Mike "Silby" Silbersack