PC crashes leave stale connections

[Shane Anderson]

Hello all,

I've got a few problems with Samba 2.0.7 on Linux (Redhat 6.1 w/ 2.2.17
kernel) that I could use a few pointers on:

We have a few PC's here that crash a little too often and sometimes leave
Samba in a wierd state.  I've seen as many as 20 smbd processed listed for
1 machine with file locks within many of the older (currently unused)
processes.  Now, it seems like the 'keepalive' option, or the SO_KEEPALIVE
socket option would take care of this, but it doesn't seem to have the
effect I'd expect.  (e.g. if keepalive = 60, then 60 seconds or so after
the machine crashes the smbd process should terminate and free up all of
it's resources..)  Anyone have an idea of what's going on?

Now I'm not sure if the above scenario is the cause of another problem,
namely Peachtree v7 on a Samba network share.  (BTW: I hate Peachtree.) 
Today we had a seemingly corrupted Peachtree database on the network that
for some odd reason wouldn't open.  'smbstatus' showed no locks on any of
the files on this share.  Peachtree would simply hang when trying to open
the files.  So... I copied the files to a new directory via the cmd line in
Linux.  (BTW: I could NOT copy the files via the Win98 client.)  Low and
behold, the same files under a different directory name would open just
fine.  Seems like a locking/contention issue, but not necessarily in Samba.
(!?)  So I rename the original directory and move the new/working directory
to the previous directory name.  Same deal on the windows client, no
worky--rename to something else and it works.  Now it looks like it's a
samba thing again.  Restarting samba across the board clears it up.  (which
I had to do after hours.)  Very strange behavior I'd say.  I'm not running
w/o oplocks on this share to see if that changes anything.  So does anyone
have any ideas here?  Anyone share Peachtree v7 databases via Samba to 5 or
so people w/o problems?  (I'd like to see a working config if possible.)

Thanks in advance for any help/advice/flamage...  :)

-= Shane.Anderson at infraredsolutions.com ======= 763-551-0003x229 =-
-= Sr. Electrical Engineer ==== http://www.infraredsolutions.com =-