broken pipe

[Neil Hoggarth]

On Mon, 11 Sep 2000, David C. Canedo wrote:

> Anyone know what this error is?
> write_socket_data: write failure. Error = Broken pipe
> 
> I'm not getting complaints from users but it is of concern.

This normally means that smbd tried to send some bytes to a network
connection that has been broken off unexpectedly by the other party.

You will get some responses from people who say that you've probably got
network problems or crashing clients, because the error often occurs
when a client system "goes away" without correctly closing down its
connection for some reason.

I know of at least one situation where such messages pop up regularly
and are *not* indicative of a problem of any sort, however. If you are
using "security = server" then every six minutes or so Samba will
attempt to send a NetBIOS keepalive packet to the password server, and
will continue to attempt to do this even after the authentication
connection has been dropped. If this is the source of your log messages
then you can quell them by adding "keepalive = 0" to the [global]
section of your smb.conf file. I wrote a report on this problem for the
Samba list recently:

http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/samba/2000-August/024526.html

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