[Samba] runaway samba, non-responsive daemons

[Joshua Weage]

I just experienced something very similar yesterday and today on HP-UX.
 Samba brought my 8 CPU, 8 GB ram server to a halt.

I have added in the 'max smbd processes' parameter into my config file
to hopefully prevent it in the future.

My guess as to the problem: occasionally when my server is very loaded,
it has NFS timeouts.  Could this cause samba to hang if it is serving
an NFS mounted directory?

I have changed the path in the shares so it points to the real disk,
not an NFS mount, but I don't know if this has fixed the problem.

Josh

--- Gary Browning <gary at iusb.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I am wondering if someone may have experienced this or might know
> what is 
> happening. First, let me lay out the ground work so you understand
> our 
> environment.  We have several large servers (dual processors, gig of
> ram, 
> 300+gig drive space) that are running redhat versions 7.0-7.3.  Some
> of the 
> severs are running samba 2.2.5, 2.2.5 (with spoolss patches), 2.2.4. 
> We 
> have a samba PDC and BDC.
> 
> We have used samba for a number of years without problems.  We have
> several 
> hundred machines that used to be able to get their personal drive
> letter 
> mapped from a single samba server.  Granted, everything was flawless
> under 
> samba 2.0.x and actually, everything worked under samba 2.2.x until
> we 
> introduced Windows XP into the blend.. or at least that's what I
> believe 
> where things started to go wrong.
> 
> Under windows XP, authentication works flawlessly; however, at times
> the 
> mapping of drive letters hangs.  On the server end we see several
> smbd 
> processes that are owned by root.  They eventually accumulate to over
> 1000 
> causing the number of open files on the server to climb.  Since the
> samba 
> daemons are not responsive we try to shutdown samba using the init.d 
> script, which fails.  A kill -HUP fails and it requires a hard kill
> to stop 
> the smbd daemons so that we can refire it up.  Once samba is running
> again, 
> all it well until another high traffic time.  We have tried leaving
> samba 
> alone; however, it does not recover which is why is we to restart 
> it.  Also, our windows xp clients hang for minute waiting for the
> mappings 
> to time out.
> 
>


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