[Samba] strange behaviour

[Jannetta S Lewis]

Hi folks

I hope someone might be able to shed some light on a problem that I am experiencing with
a Samba server. I installed this server about 2 and a half years ago on a client's site.
The server has been running fine. We are now experiencing two problems which according
to the client occured overnight.

The first problem started about a week and a half ago when they found that when trying
to access their accounts from a Windows 2000 workstation using Sage Accounting, the
workstation would appear to freeze. They went through Sage support and came to the
conclusion that there was no problem with Sage, it had to be the server or the
workstation. Since his other MS 98 workstations seemed to still work fine, we thought it
had to be the MS 2000 work station. He did find however, that when the workstation
seemed to hang, he could get it out of it's state by pulling out the network cable. The
confusing part however is that this happened overnight. Does anybody have any ideas as
to what might be causing this - how can I be sure that it is not a Samba problem.

The next problem came up a few days later. The client found that he couldn't access any
of his .csv files on the server. When trying to access them using Excel, he would get an
error: The file may be read-only, or you may be trying to access a read-only location.
Or, the server the document is stored on may not be responding. He can however, save an
xls file to exactly the same location and still open it without a problem. This problem
occurs from all the work stations.

I checked the user rights on the files and they are exactly the same for the xls and the
csv file, ie rwx for the user.

I found the following type of entries in the log:
couldn't find service c
[2003/11/10 15:16:59, 0] smbd/service.c:make_connection(252)
  workstation (10.0.0.12) couldn't find service fileserve

and

[2002/03/13 17:04:35, 0] smbd/oplock.c:oplock_break(768)
  oplock_break: receive_smb timed out after 30 seconds.
  oplock_break failed for file SHARED DATA/LINE 50 Product CSV/Uploaded to Line
50/Castle Boilersuits .csv (dev = 305, inode = 1847780).
[2002/03/13 17:04:35, 0] smbd/oplock.c:oplock_break(841)
  oplock_break: client failure in oplock break in file SHARED DATA/LINE 50 Product
CSV/Uploaded to Line 50/Castle Boilersuits .csv
[2002/03/13 17:04:35, 0] smbd/reply.c:reply_lockingX(4328)
  reply_lockingX: Error : oplock break from client for fnum = 12197 and no oplock
granted on this file (SHARED DATA/LINE 50 Product CSV/Uploaded to Line 50/Ca
stle Boilersuits .csv).

I have oplocks set to no in the conf file. I don't know anything about oplocks. Can
someone perhaps help or suggest something.

Thanks

Jannetta