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

[James Bagley Jr]

We have a very similar setup here.  The samba server automounts users home
directories to share them, most of our users are comming from an NT
Terminal server.  I fought a similar file corruption problem while running
samba 2.2.2 on HP-UX 11.11.  The issue seemed restricted to NT Terminal
Service users and primarily happened on ms word, powerpoint, and visio
documents.  It seemed to go away when we moved samba service to 2.2.3a on
a linux box, but i'm not positive that was the cause of our problems...

I've been too busy to troubleshoot this any furthur, but would like to
know what kind of solution you come up with.

Cheers!

--
James Bagley			|           CDI Innovantage
james_bagley at non.agilent.com	| Technical Computing UNIX Admin Support
   DON'T PANIC			|       Agilent Technologies IT
Phone: (541) 738-3340		|          Corvallis, Oregon
--

On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, D.A. Muran-de Assereto wrote:

> 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
>
>
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