HELP: Connections dropping whilst processes increasing.

[Cliff Green]

Did anyone ever give an answer for this problem?  

We've been experiencing something very similar to Martin Rootes' problem,
on an HP9000 K-series server, with anywhere from hundreds to thousands of
extra, unkillable smbd processes.  The odd thing is, the system load goes
*very* high, but it doesn't seem to affect anything other than further
smbd services, including preventing successful logons.

It's odd - it only happens on that one server (we run Samba on five
production servers), and there are few differences between that host and
the others.  As you can imagine, I really need to determine if our problem
is that there's something wrong with Samba, or if this is due to either
the other processes on that server or something different about the
clients that predominantly use that server.

Very unfortunately, the only way to get rid of those hundreds to thousands
of extra processes is to restart the server.  An increasingly unacceptable
solution.

My management and the support staffer on that campus believe that Samba is
the problem, because it displays this behavior (difficulty logging in, and
enormous numbers of unkillable smbd processes).  I believe it's something
else, but need to prove it.

Let's see, the only configuration options were --prefix, --with-quotas,
and --with-mmap (which I guess we'll stop using Real Soon).

The logon script mounts the user's home directory, a shared directory,
sets the time, and some antiviral housekeeping.

Help!

Anything anyone's found or any insights will be helpful.

We require domain logons, and they've worked fine for a couple of years
now (from Samba 1.9.18 to now - 2.0.5a [don't suggest upgrading to 2.0.6 -
I've got a major problem there on a testbed system]), Win95 & plain
passwords, logon scripts generated by rootpreexec calling a perl script in
[netlogon].  I believe the campus with the problem has a persistent share
defined on the clients, and I know that's not the case for the other
campuses.  log.smb on that campus shows *no* entries for "connect to
service netlogon", but many "closed connection to service netlogon", which
should not be happening.

On the other hand, that server began running both Oracle and OpenView for
network monitoring and management a few months before these problems
started to appear.

I didn't want to shower you all with log details, my smb.conf file, or the
logonscript (of course, I'll provide info if it'll help) - but can
*anyone* provide some advice, insight, or <gasp> solutions?

c
-- 
Clifford Green               Internet -  green at umdnj.edu
Academic Computing Services     voice -     732-235-5250
UMDNJ-IST                         fax -     732-235-5252