Samba can't keep NT shares mounted

[Matthew Vanecek]

I don't know who this problem belongs to, samba or Linux, but it's a
common one, judging by the responses in my INBOX to a previous post. 
Plus, it's a fairly serious one; many applications require smb shares to
be mounted continuously and without interruption.  It's been a recurring
problem which seems to have been pushed off to the side as not
important, even though it's a serious flaw.  Just where, I don't know
(i.e., kernel smbfs or samba/smbmount).

I know there must be *someone* who has a clue.  Various proposed causes
include password caching, the use of uid_t instead of __kernel_uid_t in
the smbumount code (what that has to do with keeping a share mounted,
I'm not sure), and blistering silence from those that write the code and
know it best.

Pasted below is the body of a previous unanswered post.  If any of the
experts could help, I and others would really appreciate it.


Running NT 4.0 WS SP 5 and samba 2.0.5a on Linux, 2.2.12 kernel. 
Whenever I mount an NT share from Linux, it times out after an
indeterminate period of time.  This has been a continuing problem, the
only workaround being to perform something requiring disk activity on
the NT box, bypassing the cache (i.e., ls > /dev/null doesn't work, but
df does).  This must be done on a regular basis--every two or three
minutes.

Error messages 
me2v:reliant me2v$ ls winnt
ls: winnt: Input/output error

from /var/log/messages:
Sep 15 20:09:14 reliant kernel: smb_trans2_request: result=-32, setting
invalid
Sep 15 20:10:25 reliant kernel: smb_retry: signal failed, error=-3

This was after only about 1 and 1/2 hours, give or take 15 minutes.

This has been a recurring problem since I moved to 2.0.3 from 1.9.18 way
back when, and plenty of other people have had it, also.  The typical
response is that it's a password caching problem, but the password
caching fixes, if any, haven't fixed the problem.

I would like to know 1) Is there something in NT that could be causing
this, and what that is/how to fix it, or 2) how to fix it once and for
all from the Linux side (besides not using samba, that is).  Or is there
a smb.conf undocumented option somewhere that would help?  

I don't know if this is technically a Linux problem or if it's a samba
problem, since historically smbmount has not been officially part of
samba (although it's distributed and compiled with samba), so I wasn't
sure who to post to.  Hopefully, someone has found a fix, or at least
knows what the problem is...

Incidentally, I'm pretty sure it's not an NT service pack problem, since
this has been a recurring problem with no service packs, and with SP3-5.
-- 
Matthew Vanecek
Course of Study: http://www.unt.edu/bcis
Visit my Website at http://people.unt.edu/~mev0003
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$i=pack(c5,(41*2),sqrt(7056),(unpack(c,H)-2),oct(115),10);'
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