connection failures - but only sometimes

[David L. Jarvis]

Greetings,

I have RH6.2 and Samba 2.0.5a-12 with Win98SE workstations (approx 20).
I have the same share mapped as the same drive letter on all workstations.
The Windows username/password is the same on the Linux box and we are
using cleartext passwords via the registry hack.

Here is the problem: sometimes a workstation will fail to map to the share,
giving the error "Connection to \\XXX\X\Xxxxxx Failed" and
"Permanent connection not available".

When rebooted the workstation might work just fine, and not have the
problem again for weeks.

It doesn't happen every time (a small % of the time) and not always on
the same workstation.  I can find no pattern of any kind to this.

The log file gives the common "Broken pipe" error message:
write_socket: Error writing 4 bytes to socket 7: ERRNO = Broken pipe

Once connected, there are no problems using the share, ie; it doesn't just
disappear for no reason, it always seems to be at boot that this happens.

Sometimes we can just go into Windows Explorer and try to go to the
drive letter even tho it's got the red X and it will connect and everything
works ok from that point on.

This seems like some sort of initial timeout problem, but I'm at a loss.

I've read all the FAQ's and troubleshooting documents, but please feel
free to RTFM me if there's some reading I need to do.
Any help, even RTFM'ing, is appreciated!

Peace
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David L. Jarvis
David at JarvisMountain.com
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