[Samba] WinXP, samba 2.2.7, and intermittent "unable to open passdb"

[Mark G. Adams]

Greetings.

We are seeing an intermittent problem with Samba on our RedHat 8.0 file
server (also seen with RedHat 7.3 prior to the upgrade to 8.0).
Normally, a Windows XP machine can connect to the file server's shares
and work on them. However, sometimes after being up for a while,
connections from the XP machine to the file server no longer work.

In particular, on the XP side, the following error message is seen:
	<Drive> is not accessible.
	Logon failure: unknown username or bad password

In the log file on the file server, the log file for the XP machine
contains the following lines once failures begin (repeated several
times):

[2003/01/09 13:16:19, 0] passdb/pdb_smbpasswd.c:pdb_getsampwnam(1369)
  unable to open passdb database.

The workaround for this so far has been to restart the Samba server on
the file server. One thing that's helped a bit is to specify a 'deadtime
= 5' in smb.conf, but we still see the failure frequently.

Note that other clients can continue to connect to and use the file
server.

Any ideas on how we can avoid this, or conversely is there a patch to
fix this issue?

Here's our current setup:
PDC: Samba-2.2.7-1.7.3 on RedHat 7.3, security = user
file server: Samba-2.2.7-2 on RedHat 8.0, security = server, password
server = <PDC machine>
Client: Windows XP SP1 (running in VMWare on RedHat 8.0)
- side note: we're running an rsh daemon on the XP machine as a NT
service; the bug is most often triggered when using the daemon remotely,
although not always

Let me know of any further info I can provide to help track this down.

Thanks.

//Mark
-- 
Mark G. Adams
Research & Development
OmniMark Technologies
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
mga at omnimark.com