Multiple smbd daemons

[Neil Hoggarth]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2000, David Evans-Roberts wrote:

> 1) Whenever I do a copy of a file a child process of the smbd daemon
> is created and does not die.  I start the daemon from a script in
> /etc/rc2.d and have only modified inetd.conf for the swat entry. In
> main usage I would soon get hundreds of smbd daemons.

The child process that you are referring to is a forked smbd process, I
assume?

The normal way smbd works is to have one parent process, which forks a
child smbd to handle each incoming connection. The child persists as
long as the client machine stays connected, and handles all the requests
from that client. When the user of the client disconnects all shares,
logs off or shuts down the machine then the connection to the server is
closed and the child smbd exits.

So: if you have several hundred clients logged in to a server
simultaneously then it is normal for you to have several hundred smbds
running (much as you would have several hundred telnetd, rlogind or
sshds running if all those people were shell users).

If however you're saying that smbds are being created per individual
file operation and then aren't aren't going away, or if smbds aren't
going away when clients disconnect from the server, then something odd
is going on.

Regards,
-- 
Neil Hoggarth                                 Departmental Computer Officer
<neil.hoggarth at physiol.ox.ac.uk>                   Laboratory of Physiology
http://www.physiol.ox.ac.uk/~njh/                  University of Oxford, UK