[Samba] Tall tale of woe....

[Ross McInnes (Systems)]

Many thanks for your reply gerry, its certainly put some light to all of 
this.

in answer to your questions....

> I'm assuming that you are running version 2.2.x
> (included with RH8)..  Have you tested 3.0 (wait until
> 3.0.1 if you haven't yet since there are a lot of bug
> fixes in it).

im running 2.2.8a with no imediate plans to upgrade, unless everything
else ive tried fails.

> What is the smbd process doing ?  Trying running strace
> or get a backtrace in gdb to find out where it is spending
> its time.
> 

When and if it happens again i will try and get an strace
im assuming its simply strace -p PID

does it log the results somewhere? or do i >> to a log file?
was thinking just in case it was a lot of information.

> 
> Probably fctnl() calls when looking up data in a tdb.
> Find out which tdb  (withe look in /proc/<pid>/fd to
> match the file descriptor or us lsof).
> 
> Also check the network traffic at this point.

very useful command that lsof. again when it happens i will definatly have
a look.

> Are you servning printers by chance?  If so have you
> set 'disable spoolss = yes' ?  I've seen high CPU utilization
> cases in relation to this param.

yes i am serving printers.. ive just checked the config and i dont have
'disable spoolss = yes'

 
> use mii-tool and check the duplex settings.  And any
> hardware can have problem no matter what the price tag
> says :-)
> Chgeck you routers.  Maybe they are getting overloaded or
> are dropping packets.
 
Ah, yes network traffic. i ran mii-tool and it reports
eth0: negotiated 100baseTx-FD flow-control, link ok

However, its a GB card and acording to the switch linked at a GB. im
hoping mii-tool is wrong.....

ive just enabled monitoring on switch and will keep an eye on this...
we also run an admin network here, which is on the same equipment. Never 
during these outages have they complained about it being slow or 
unusable...

however thats not to say that its nothing to do with it, since it could be 
just that server and the port its on.

i'd just like to say i really apriciate your help in this matter.

Many Thanks

Ross McInnes