Troubleshooting 64-bit "cookie" / hash issue on Solaris 10

Ray Van Dolson rvandolson at esri.com
Thu Aug 22 08:23:22 MDT 2013


On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 09:20:19AM -0400, David Collier-Brown wrote:
> On 08/22/2013 02:38 AM, Ray Van Dolson wrote:
> > Apologies for cross-posting on the technical list.  After doing some
> > significant reading today though, I'm thinking this may be the more
> > appropriate audience.
> >
> > Ran into an issue[1] with the vendor (Oracle) provided Samba stack in
> > Solaris 10 talking to an ext4-backed NFS export on a RHEL6 server.
> > Even after upgrading to the latest Samba provided by Oracle (3.6.15)
> > the issue persisted.
> >
> > After much Googling, came across a tip that led us to disable dir_index
> > on our ext4 file system.  Lo and behold this fixed our issue!  But am
> > trying to understand which piece of the equation was breaking down
> > here (Linux kernel, Linux NFS daemon, Solaris or Samba).
> >
> > Based on comments on LWN[2], am thinking that the issues we were seeing
> > could be due to how Samba is handling the readdir() results it gets
> > back.  Although I see mention of Samba being impacted by the ext4/ext3
> > changes on the LWN articles as well as mention of impact in a patch to
> > ext3 and ext4 by Eric Sandeen[3], I was unable to find a bug in Samba's
> > bug database nor anything on the samba-technical mailing list that led
> > me to believe this may have been fixed.  Perhaps my search-fu just
> > sucks though.
> >
> > I'm also wondering if perhaps Oracle is just building their Samba
> > wrong or if we need to apply some other underlying parts of Solaris to
> > make things work.
> >
> > Would any Samba developers be willing to comment on the state of this
> > issue and whether or not it still is affecting Samba?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Ray
> >
> > [1] https://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2013-August/175136.html
> > [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/544772/
> > [3] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.file-systems.ext4/37932
> >
> If I can help, include me in: I used to work on just such problems for
> the (late, lamented) Sun Microsystems, and I might be able to contribute
> on the Solaris side.
> 
> --dave

Thanks, Dave.  Will do.

Will probably try fully patching the OS one one of these Solaris 10
systems over the weekend (sadly none are set up to do ZFS based Live
Upgrade, so patching is a little painful).

I will note that the Samba server on a fully-patched RHEL 6.4 system
(Samba 3.6.9-151) doesn't exhibit the same symptoms -- even when
pointing at an ext3/4 backed NFS mount where dir_index is enabled.

Could point to Oracle missing some patches that have been backported to
RHEL's Samba or something in the OS of course.

Ray


More information about the samba-technical mailing list