[Samba] Home server drops connection, can't reconnect

[Andrew Klaassen]

We've got samba 2.2.1a running on a number of servers.  Windows
2000 Professional is running on the clients.  Only one server is
giving us problems: our home server.

The connection to the home server will disappear, and Windows
2000 will refuse to reconnect (it inevitably returns an
"Incorrect username/password" error).  Rebooting the client, or
waiting for 15 minutes or so, allows the share to be
reconnected.

Disconnection does not seem to be related to load on the server
or clients, though at first we suspected it might be.

We do not recall seeing this problem with Windows NT, although
we upgraded to 2000 and to 2.2.1a at about the same time, so
it's hard to tell if that was just a coincidence.

We've tried playing with timeout options (keepalive and deadtime
in smb.conf, HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\lanmanserver\
parameters\autodisconnect in Windows 2000), but it hasn't helped
at all.

We've had this problem for a couple of months, now, and it's
extremely irritating.

Has anyone else seen this problem?  Does anyone have suggestions
for a solution?  Any idea why it might only happen with the home
server?

Andrew Klaassen