[Samba] Oplock break request failures

[Ray Simard]

I hope someone can enlighten me on this.

Situation: NT network, Samba PDC, about 20 NT 4.0 workstations. log(s).smbd 
are created per machine for easier analysis (as log.smbd.<NetBios Name>).

Not often, but often enough to be of concern, are errors in 
request_oplock_break that seem to indicate that another smbd process that 
should be listening for break requests on a UDP socket isn't, or isn't 
responding. Some time ago, for some very strange reason, the system was 
configured with share modes off, which caused these errors to occur 
constantly. That was corrected and now they are infrequent, but not 
infrequent enough, I suspect, to ignore.

One possibly significant fact: there are two subnets. The cross-subnet 
browsing recommendations have been followed and we have no trouble browsing 
across the subnets; but all of the failures I'm writing about occur on the 
subnet which is remote from the one on which the Samba PDC resides. None of 
the samba logs associated with any of the several NT workstations on the 
local subnet with the Samba machine show this error. I can't see how that 
would matter, given that the inter-process oplock break requests are simply 
UDP communications and don't use subnet broadcasts - unless I'm mistaken, a 
very real possibility. :-)

Does anyone have a hint on what might cause this, how to troubleshoot it more 
fully, or if it's really nothing to worry about?

Ray Simard