Oplock Problems: Start HERE!!!!!!!!!

Cary T. Conrad conrad at messagesecure.com
Fri Jul 16 05:28:26 GMT 1999


I am writing this to help those that have experienced the problem of
clients having problems with the Samba Shares and the error noted in the
logs is the dreaded oplock issue. Perhaps this would be a good addition to
the FAQ.

Start of oplock analysis
----------------------------------

We spent a 48hr session trying to solve this, it turn out to be a hub,


Started with the oplock condition and people not being able to see the
share on the samba 2.0.3 system running on Solaris 2.5.1. They would
experience network loss and general weirdness.

In the PC logs there would be oplock issues, however, these are artifacts
of the problem NOT the problem.

-------Start of Sample---------------------
log.barbara:[1999/06/28 08:52:37, 0] smbd/oplock.c:request_oplock_break(943)

log.barbara:  request_oplock_break: no response received to oplock break
request
 to pid 2750 on port 45130 for dev = 1980006, inode = 6979357           
--------End of Sample----------------

What the oplock break request(sample above) is saying is that the system
cannot _see_ a file so it is trying to broadcast to other systems to let it
go(this is my simple interpretation). You may see that the oplocks are
directed to the same process that the trouble is on. In other words the PC
having the problems is oplock break requesting itself.

The issue is odd, or troublesome network connectivity. This is evident as
the file system is not working to specification. 

This seemed to be a network problem. Seems that the mini hub that connects
the servers in the server room was having trouble connecting to the hubs in
the hub room. This was a problem that was discovered by connecting the
mini-hub and PC's together  without the rest of the network connected. This
would work fine. When the network was connected to the mini-hub. there was
trouble.

Seems as if the combination of the mini hub and the rest of the network was
causing some issues. Could not see these in the snoop records............

In summary, if this error is seen, removing oplocks in global (oplocks=no)
will _not_ fix it! To check the network issue connect the PC and the samba
server in a small hub with no other connections, if this works there is a
net problem somewhere on your LAN.

CC



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