Rapid transfers cause kernel panic

[Peter J. Holzer]

On 2000-04-26 17:40:19 +1000, Jeremy Seth Henry wrote:
> Our site has been experiencing problems with Samba causing kernel
> panics under heavy use. We are running Mandrake 7.0 and Samba 2.0.6.
> We are no longer using the distro included with Mandrake - we actually
> downloaded the 2.0.6 release and recompiled. Downloading from Samba
> shares causes no problems - and downloads are frequent and heavy - but
> uploading similar amounts of data leaves a catatonic server at best
> and a kernel panic at worst. Dropping several > 1Mb files on a share
> will usually do it. This has been the case using a dual processor
> Celeron 433 and a single processor AMD K6-2. Both systems have plenty
> of RAM and disk space and run fine with NFS. We first noticed the
> problem on a AMD K5-133 system, and initially attributed the problem
> to the NIC, but later tests proved the hardware is fine. I ran a
> "samba-less" linux install on it for several months with no unusual
> behavior.

Programs shouldn't be able to cause a kernel panic, so this is a bug in
kernel space, whether it happens only with samba or not. NFS uses UDP,
so it probably has different timing characteristics and doesn't trigger
the bug. You could try using FTP or ttcp to generate a similar amount of
traffic and see if it crashes, too.

> This system normally runs X, so I can't see the kernel panic screens.
> Given the repeatable nature of the problem, I can drop out of X and
> cause the crash. If any other info is needed - send me an email.

The panic message would be interesting, but you should send it to
kernel-dev, not samba. You might also want to read the docs reporting
bugs in /usr/src/linux, if you haven't already.

	hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer      | E = mc²     -- Albert Einstein
|_|_) | Sysadmin WSR / LUGA  | E(M) = C    -- Bruce Schneier
| |   | hjp at wsr.ac.at        |   -- noticed by rain forest puppy
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/   |	    on bugtraq 2000-04-20
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