Multiple users connecting from same Windows box confusing samba?

[Mark G. Adams]

Greetings.

We are seeing an intermittent problem with Samba on our RedHat 8.0 file
server (also seen with RedHat 7.3 prior to the upgrade to 8.0).
Normally, a Windows XP machine can connect to the file server's shares
and work on them. However, sometimes after being up for a while,
connections from the XP machine to the file server no longer work.

In particular, on the XP side, the following error message is seen:
	<Drive> is not accessible.
	Logon failure: unknown username or bad password

In the log file on the file server, the log file for the XP machine
contains the following lines once failures begin (repeated several
times):

[2003/01/09 13:16:19, 0] passdb/pdb_smbpasswd.c:pdb_getsampwnam(1369)
  unable to open passdb database.

Note that the file server is using security = server, so it doesn't use
passdb at all.

The workaround for this so far has been to restart the Samba server on
the file server. One thing that's helped a bit is to specify a 'deadtime
= 5' in smb.conf, but we still see the failure frequently.

Note that other clients can continue to connect to and use the file
server without issues.

Any ideas on how we can avoid this, or conversely is there a patch to
fix this issue?

Here's our current setup:
PDC: Samba-2.2.7-1.7.3 on RedHat 7.3, security = user
file server: Samba-2.2.7-2 on RedHat 8.0, security = server, password
server = <PDC machine>
Client: Windows XP SP1 (running in VMWare on RedHat 8.0)

A side note: we're running an rsh daemon on the XP machine as a Windows
service; the bug is most often triggered when using the daemon remotely,
although not always. To clarify, this means that the same user can be
logged into the XP machine twice (once at the console and once as the
service) and both connecting to the same share on the file server.

Let me know of any further info I can provide to help track this down.

Thank you for your assistance.

//Mark
-- 
Mark G. Adams
Research & Development
OmniMark Technologies
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
mga at omnimark.com