[Samba] Tall Tale of Woe. Cont'd

[Ross McInnes]

Some time ago i posted about some problems with a RH 8 Dell 2500 server
running samba, and it kernel panicing etc.

Some useful suggestions about running strace came about but my problem was
actually being "there" as it was crashing.
last week i finally caught it "at it" and ran strace logging etc. But
unfortunatly i have no idea what it is i should be looking for!

This aside i changed the network card from the onboard to a dual gb nic,
when it panic'd it mentioned information about the network card etc.
Which is what i did this morning..

Coming back onto the server i noticed no smb processes at 1st this didnt
suprise me since we are at half term and have no students in.
i then tried to logon and it failed. perplexed i ps aux'd the server and
noticed there was no smbd process.
because of problems in the past i had taken it out of auto startup. started
smbd could  log on no problems and all seemed well.

ran 'ps aux | grep samba | wc' and it returned 6 processes running

all ok there...
i asked a few others to logon again running  'ps aux | grep samba | wc' and
it returned 36 processes.
i now have a total of 7 people logged on mapping 5 drives each and a total
of 124 smbd -D processes.

I look at another samba server, with 6 people logged on each mapping 2
drives and only 12 smbd -D processes.
Now keep in mind during a normal working day there are on average 100-200
people logged on at any one time.

could this be something to do with my problems?

also for 7 users it started using 150 mb of ram. its now upto 230mb and no
aditional users.
some of this can be put down to OS usage but its still worrying.

Can anyone tell me what each smbd -D process would be used by?

Many Thanks

PS in the time it took me to write this email the smbd -D processes have
gone down to 105 (half way through) and now up to 115.
Still the same amount of users logged on.

Weird.