Weird uids going through nsswitch

[Wade Turland]

Hi all

Our samba server is going belly-up several times a day in peak times and I
think this is related. Load averages skyrocket to 200.00 or more and we get
thousands of stray processes. The only solution I've found is to kill all
smbd processes and restart samba, which will allow the workstations to
reconnect.

We are seeing strange userid lookups going through the name service switch
to the ldap server. Note, this is not samba with ldap, only padl.com's
nss_ldap-87 which has run reliably for 2 years or more.

Recently we upgraded about 1000 lab machines to Win2k running Novell
clients. Students' login scripts do a

NET USE H: \\HOST\USERID PASSWORD /USER=USERID

to mount the samba home drive.

When we look at the eDirectory ldap server, we see weird requests coming
through. Eg.

filter= (&(objectclass=posixAccount)(uid=LABS-75-194'0012345678))

where LABS-75-194   is the workstation name
and   12345678      is the student's userid

Can anyone suggest why this is happening and how to stop it? Is it a normal
and legal protocol activity? I've tried tcpdump and setting samba's debug
level to 9, but neither seems to show anything related except some logs
have copious amounts of:

[2002/03/26 15:45:42, 5] passdb/pdb_smbpasswd.c:getsmbfilepwent(437)
  getsmbfilepwent: returning passwd entry for user 13017620, uid 13017620

for all different user names. Is it searching for every user for some
reason?

And why is it putting the '00 in front of the userid?

Wade.

-- 
/==============================================================\
|  Wade Turland                  | Locked Bag 1797             |
|  Unix Administrator            | Penrith South DC NSW 1797   |
|  University of Western Sydney  | Phone: +61 2 4736 0291      |
|  Room V137 (Kingswood)         | Fax:   +61 2 4736 0010      |
\==============================================================/
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