New clients stop connecting, whilst existing OK.

[Lee Howard]

At 11:11 AM 11/1/00 GMT0BST, Martin Rootes wrote:
>Dear All,
>
>	I'm seeing problems with samba 2.0.6 running on a Sun E450 running
Solaris 2.7, what is 
>happening is that people will start reporting problems with students
attempting to connect
>to the server, whilst at the same time existing connections seem to be
unaffected apart from
>a performance slow down. uptime reports a high load, and doing 'pgrep smbd
| wc -l' shows 
>~2000 smbd processes running, but smbstatus -b only shows ~200 or so (we
can have up to 
>1000 connections in normal use). This situation last for about 30 minutes
then the extra smbd 
>processes die of and the users can then get connections without any problem.
>
>The logs show this kind of activity when the problem is occurring:-
>
>[2000/10/30 16:06:47, 0] lib/util_sock.c:write_socket_data(537)
>  write_socket_data: write failure. Error = Broken pipe
>[2000/10/30 16:06:47, 0] lib/util_sock.c:write_socket(563)
>  write_socket: Error writing 4 bytes to socket 7: ERRNO = Broken pipe
>[2000/10/30 16:06:47, 0] lib/util_sock.c:send_smb(751)
>  Error writing 4 bytes to client. -1. Exiting

Martin, you may want to review today's post from David Collier-Brown called:

Re: logon errors, write_socket_data: write failure. Error = Brokenpipe

I'm having the same issues on one of the servers that I maintain.  I don't
have this problem on any of the others, and the setup is nearly identical.
I would recommend to you to upgrade Samba, though, to 2.0.7.  That helped
me in other aspects.

Because in my case, the failure occurs on all clients, I don't think that
it's related to one specific network card of theirs.  I don't think it's
the hub or wiring, but I could be wrong on the hub, possibly.  If I'm to
bet, I'll bet that because my Samba server is also acting as an
IP-forwarding/masquerading box for about 15 other systems, and sometimes
their combined pull on the internet is fairly heavy (downloading mp3s, the
goons), and I think that the 3c59x driver that comes with the kernel is
failing for the 3C905C card that is in there.  I discovered last night that
3Com has their own linux driver for the 3C90x series, so I'll be applying
that very shortly (today) to see if it has any effect.  Then, I'll follow
David's message about turning the messages off and not worrying about it.

What kind of ethernet card are you using, anyway?

Lee Howard