[Samba] IE 5.01, Shell Folders, Windows 2000 and Samba 2.2.3a

[Douglas Pace]

Recently at my University we upgraded our Samba servers from 2.2.0 to 
2.2.3a.  After the upgrade, one of the server's(Solaris 2.6) loads 
increased dramatically. From an average load of 2 to sometimes as high as 
20 during heavy use. This appeared to be almost exclusively from the Samba 
processes as a handful of those processes took up approx 5% of the CPU 
EACH.  Doing a truss on these processes revealed that it was calling stat64 
and chmod continuously on Windows shell folders for History and 
Cookies.  These processes only appeared when the end user was using 
IE(further testing narrowed this down to only 5.01).  Obviously our shell 
folders are pointed to a network mapped drive from the Samba server.

After dealing with this for a day, we attempted to rollback to 2.2.0.  This 
still didn't solve our problems and trussing the processes showed similar 
behavior(stat64 and chmod on the History and Cookies folder). After 
spending some time trying to find a solution to this problem, we discovered 
deleting the Cookies and History folders on each of the user's samba mounts 
resulted in fixing the problem.

Has anyone else experienced this type of behavior, and if so were you able 
to fix it any other way? Are there any fixes for this type of thing? Thanks 
and hopefully I'm not being repetitive.

Not sure what information is helpful, but here we go.
Server - E450 running Solaris 2.6 with approx 150-200 clients at any 
time(during heavy loads). Running only as a file server(no DC).
Workstations - primarily Windows 2000 with IE 5.01(there are others, but 
this is the majority of the clients).

Again thanks for all the great work and any help you can possibly give with 
this problem.


Douglas Pace
Douglas.Pace at nau.edu
928-523-1655
Systems Programmer, NAU