[Samba] Garbage in smbstatus

[Alexey Lobanov]

Hello.

I have the following bad problem running Samba on Linux. After a quite short uptime 
(couple of weeks) smbstatus starts to report that non-existent processes lock some non-
existent files:

23921 DENY_ALL 0x3 RDWR EXCLUSIVE+BATCH Е[ Fri Aug 15 12:57:08 2003

(and dozens of lines like that, with same ugly "filename", now 395)

Actually, process numbers are real: smbd with this PID was running few hours ago and 
finished it's life without any bad diagnostics. Filename "Е[" is just a 8-bit garbage, 
readers with different fonts will see different glyphs here.

The typical real total number of opened files is 700..2000 for few users: it's Access, 
folks.

Surely, ther real problem is not bad output but bad locking: soon after that the 
accounting database (MS-Access engine) start to claim false record lockings, etc. 
Restarting Samba with erasing locks.tdb solves the problem for some period.

Upgrade from Samba 2.2.7 to 2.2.8a does not change anything. Upgrade from Linux kernel 
2.4.19 to 2.4.21 does not change anything. Downgrade from SMP to single-head machine 
(complete hardware replacement except HDD's) does not change anything. Moving /var/ to 
other HDD at IDE channel does not change anything. The whole system stability is OK, 
looks like only Samba is affected.

Has anyone seen something like that?

Alexey