Multiple smbd processes generated

[Andrew Boswell]

We have an occasional problem which manifests with multiple processes 
being created for a particular user.  For example, for a user "xy004":

xy004       8463  0.0  0.0 6.02M   0K ??       IW   11:48:59     0:02.02 smbd
xy004       9426  0.0  0.0 5.99M   0K ??       IW   11:52:18     0:03.68 smbd
xy004      10433  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:17:20     0:00.85 smbd
xy004      12211  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:29:50     0:00.88 smbd
xy004      12588  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:16:05     0:00.55 smbd
xy004      12968  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:18:40     0:00.85 smbd
xy004      13069  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:19:55     0:00.86 smbd
xy004      13223  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:21:10     0:00.83 smbd
xy004      13396  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:22:27     0:00.86 smbd
xy004      13579  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:23:42     0:00.82 smbd
xy004      13772  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:24:52     0:00.87 smbd
xy004      13887  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:26:07     0:00.83 smbd
xy004      14064  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:27:18     0:00.82 smbd
xy004      14220  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:28:35     0:00.85 smbd
xy004      14743  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:31:05     0:00.98 smbd
xy004      14963  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:32:30     0:00.93 smbd
xy004      15609  0.0  0.0 5.81M   0K ??       IW   12:33:55     0:00.87 smbd

This has manifested in two ways:

1) For just a single user.  The processes remain following 
disconnection from Samba, and *CANNOT* be killed (with "kill -9" etc).  
In this situtaion they have status <defunct>, and the user cannot 
reconnect to Samba.  This has caused a problem to the user - they 
couldn't connect to Samba, except if the Samba server was rebooted.  As 
we have parallel servers, we have however been able to tell users to 
use a different server.

2) For multiple users.  This has happened once, but required an 
emergency reboot of the server due to the process table limit being 
reached - the above process list was obtained just before shutting down 
the server in this case.

We are using Compaq Tru64 Unix (ex- Digital Unix) and Samba 2.0.6.

Has anyone else encountered these problems and know what causes them?  
I can find no evidence in the log files of anything wrong for the user 
to which this happens.  

TIA

Andrew

======================================================================
Dr Andrew Boswell		email : A.Boswell at uea..ac.uk	
School Liaison Consultant       phone : +44-1603-593856
IT and Computing Services 	fax   : +44-1603-593467
University of East Anglia	
Norwich, NR4 7TJ, UK