Samba disappearing from the network

infinity at gamersinn.com infinity at gamersinn.com
Wed Oct 1 21:07:54 GMT 1997


I've recently installed a network fileserver for my business partner's 
father's appraisal business running samba 1.9.17p2. I have domain logons, 
wins, browse master, et al turned on.  I'm having problems  when 
'something' happens, and people can no longer log on (they get that ever 
so bothersome 'no domain server' message), and it looks like samba 
completely locks up since even currently mapped drives lock up.

What I think may be happening is when someone running the appraisal 
software (old dos crap that requires a physical license block on the LPT
port) is closed without exiting normally, which causes samba to hang
possibly? Or receive a signal to wait on a couple of sockets, then
eventually exit? I haven't delved into the code at all yet, I've been too
busy trying to teach 25 people who can barely even log onto a simple
novell network how use windows 95 and fixing hardware problems we're
having along the way.

And since people are here between 6AM and 7PM, my hours of playing
around with the config file are rather limited.

When this happens, I can telnet to the machine fine, but if I kill all 
occurrences of smbd and nmbd, that still doesn't fix it. I have to 
manually ifconfig eth0 down, killall smbd and nmbd, wait 10 seconds or 
so, then re-run the inet script and everything's fine until someone else 
does something stupid.

I've looked through all of the man pages, docs, the old mails on the 
mailing list, and have seen nobody else admitting they have this problem, 
or are just fortunate enough to have not run into it.

I'm not sure how or why this is happening, since a separate smbd is run 
for each person mounting a share. This also happened under 1.9.15p6 as 
well, so it's not a latest release bug, and I haven't run into this
problem on the other 2 small LANs (2 pcs for one, and 4 for the other).
But then again, there's 14 computers and 25 computer novices using badly
written DOS software, I was bound to hit some sort of brick wall :)

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks :)



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