"Disk full" error message with certain apps

[Mark Branigan]

Hi all,

First off, .... Samba --  great bit of software, goes like a rocket.
Now I have done a bit of creeping, on to the problem.

The problem is solid, repeatable and reproducible.

My gut feeling is it is something to do with the way Samba and certain 
Microsoft file creation/modification/extending APIs interact.


The problem *******

When trying to save files into a directory which is on a Samba server 
via an NT4 workstation I get variations on the theme that the disk is 
full. Word 97 reports  "The save failed due to out of memory or disk 
space" and then after retrying I get "The disk is full. Free some space 
yadda blah blah etc ..."

Other apps report "Disk Full". These include a package called PenServer 
and Eudora & Photoshop have also been reported to me.

Some apps are ok. For example Mozilla and Excel.

The fun bit is that
The disk is nowwhere near full.  49GB share with 45GB available
I can save a 50MB file into the same directory via NT explorer.
I can save the word document in the parent directory.
I can save the word document in some of the sibling directories but not 
all of them.

We're using Samba 2.2.4 precompiled binary from samba.org on Solaris 2.8 
SPARC hardware.
The clients are NT4 workstations with SP6a.

Samba logs have nothing related to the problem.
I have checked available inodes and only 1% are used.
The disk space free stats are all ok.
The oplock and other locking settings appear to have very little effect.
Snoop-ing the network traffic reveals very little apart from client and 
server happily talking to each other.
Truss doesn't show any odd behaviour or unusual error messages.
Debug level 5 doesn't show any unusual messages, just slows down samba.

Problem end ********


I posted this to the samba list but had very little response apart from 
a number of people e-mailing privately saying they also have a problem, 
can't find a fix and to let them know what the fix is.

I have raised it as a bug (PR#24286) but I am not sure how long it takes 
to wiggle it's way through the system.  Hopefully somebody here can help 
or let me know where else I can get help with this problem. Apologies if 
this list isn't the right place.

Anyhelp greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Mark