[Samba] Runaway samba processes

[Robert Euston]

Hi,

I need some help!

We have Samba 2.2.5 running on AIX 4.3.3. The server is a very heavy 
duty server, and has 3 main shares, which are very large.

The problem is that after a few days of running, the server suddenly 
stops killing off newly spawned smbd processes. They do not die, even 
when the original smbd process is killed. They will respond to a kill 
-9, but killing off the main PID does not kill the runaway children. 
(Instead, their PPID goes to 1 )

Killing off all the smbd processes with kill -9, and restarting the 
daemon fixes the problem.

This really isn't acceptable. The only thing I can see in the log is 
that there is rogue machine doing connects with a bad userid/password 
pair. This is occuring in the log every second or so. The problem here 
is that we are running at a high debug level, and the log is overwritten 
within minutes due to this problem.

At the moment I am running a test to see if I can reliably reproduce the 
problem by replicating the rogue login attempts on a test box. There's 
another test in the pipeline to save a log file large enough to record 
when it starts so we have more of an idea whats going on, as the logs 
written after the processes start running away aren't much help.

Thoughts :

It could be that samba isn't closing the socket properly. This fits, if 
the process is waiting for the socket to close, but it stays open 
(deadlocked condition?). Why this might be, I can only guess. I've 
proved that it works again on the same machine after killing off the 
runaways, so it does not appear to be an environment issue.

It might be a problem with AIX and Samba under certain conditions.

A Memory leak maybe?

In any case, I would be grateful for some ideas/help.

Thanks,
Robert