Frozen Samba

mikew mike.walster at expert.sungard.com
Thu Oct 18 06:33:03 GMT 2001


Hi all,

I am having a problem of considerable complexity. I will try
and be succinct.

I have looked around on google for a solution which led me
here. I have looked in the archive for this mailing list but did
not see anything to hopeful. However I did not see an easy
way to search to the archive, so I was looking manually and
could easily have missed something.

My overall problem is that my workstation just freezes up and
thats it. I have to power down and restart to get things going
again.

Here is my system. (there is another machine with the specifications)

Rehat 7.1
kernel 2.4.2-2
gmc 4.5.51
samba 2.0.7-36
OpenSSH_2.5.2p2

Here is what I know.
Both machines are on a network with a Windows NT domain.
The machines are not part of the domain themselves.
(at least they are not logging in to the domain)
Both machines have shares to the network.
Both machines can see the other windows machines and the other
windows machines can see them.
Both machines use dhcp.

Here is the condition.
One machine is running a cvs server and is being used as our build
machine. From my workstation I mount 4 shares from the other linux
box. These include the area where ant is (read, write), the cvs
repository (read only) the area where our build tools are
(read write) and  the output area where ant places the build (read write).
I use mount -t smbfs //sungardbuild/sharename
There is no password or username and everything works fine.
I connect to the same machine with ssh to actually run the build.
The build process creates a tree on one of the shares with all of
our files in it (around 5000). The first thing that the build process does
is delete the tree from the previous build and then rebuild. One or two
iterations of this process and when I try and browse the share
with the new build tree using gmc, thats it I will freeze up solid. I can
do nothing at this point. The machine responds not at all. I have to shut
the power off. I do get a core dump.

Other tidbits
kde and Konqueror behave the same way only much more frequently.
gnome and gmc are nicer but still do it.
I can't /make/ it happen but it /will/ happen every every few iterations.
I have vmware express on my workstation with win 95 I have no difficulties
viewing the shares with this machine.
The condition occurs wether vmware is running or not.
I tried shutting down ssh and running the build from the build machine
itself the condition still occurs.

If I unmount the shares on my workstation run the build and remount the
shares on my workstation, the condition does not occur. At least
I have not seen it happen, and I used this procedure for several hours
yesterday with no hangs. Without doing the unmount first it will hang
in the next several minutes if I am doing builds.

I used to run this same process from my win 2K workstation without 
difficulty.
I have only recently gone to linux as a full time workstation for myself.
The linux box doing the builds is the same box as it has always been.

One other thing that I noticed but did not get a specific handle on.
After my workstation reboots. I can remount the shares and browse them
but I cannot write to them (access denied) until I restart samba on
the build machine. It also seemed one time like the editor on my
workstation would save the file but it was really not changed on the build
machine. I know this isn't always the case because I edit the files
on the build machine all of the time. Again this does not seem to occur
from windows machines only from my linux workstation. And I have not
seen the build machine have any difficulties on its end. Except for the
need to restart samba occasionally after my workstation has crashed,
though I believe the windows machines still browse the shares normally
without the samba restart. It should be noted that samba still appears
to be running normally on the build machine when I restart it. The only
thing I don't seem to have it write access to the shares from my
workstation.

Any ideas as to what I can do to further narrow down this problem
would be appreciated. I also realize that this may not even be a samba
problem but it appears to at least be related and I don't know what
else to do at this point.
Thanks and have a nice day
mw-






























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