[Samba] File corruption with samba 2.2.3a and WinNt/TSE 4.0

[D.A. Muran-de Assereto]

I've got a poser here. Runs like this:

We are using two NT Terminal servers to provide basic office automation
(Word, etc) and Outlook email capability to about 50-75 UNIX users. The
users connect from various types of Suns, all running Solaris 7 with the
latest updates.

File services are provided to the TSE users and about 200 dedicated NT
workstations via a Sun E450 running Solaris 7 and samba 2.2.3a. The user's
home directories are mounted via NFS onto the samba box and re-shared via
samba.

We have had essentially no problems with this set up for months, once we got
the basic locking issues resolved. Recently, however, my TSE users have been
experiencing corruption of their large files, primarily Outlook PST file and
large powerpoint presentations. The corrupted PST files are easily
recoverable using scanpst.

While troubleshooting this, I looked at the contents of one of the corrupted
files. The Outlook data structures appear to be intact (as validated by the
success with scanpst), but segments of the samba logfile are interspersed
throughout the PST files. The segments are non-sequential in time, and are
spread out over at least a 40-minute time span. They contain error messages
pertaining to other TSE users on the same machine.

Upon further investigation, I discovered that all of the Terminal Server
users were connected to the same instance of smbd.

Upon reflection, I realized that that was to be expected because of the
configuration; what seems to be happening, however, is that somehow samba is
getting confused in its memory allocation and grabbing hold of memory that
is used for log buffering.

Over all of the incidents, the data points have been the same:
1) Large files
2) Corrupt but recoverable because the log data has been inserted into the
file rather than overwriting data.
3) Users from Terminal Server.

Anyone have any ideas about where I might start to try and fix this? We
can't get rid of TSE, which was my first suggestion, nor can we run samba
directly on the machine doing the NFS exporting to the samba machine.

Thanks

D.A. Muran-de Assereto
System Integrator
General Dynamics