[Samba] Access Suddenly Cut Off to Samba Shares

[AndyLiebman at aol.com]

Hi. 

I'm hoping some samba genius has a clue about what's happening on my system. 

I am using Mandrake 10 "Community Release". It comes with Samba 3.0.2. I have 
been using it without problems for two weeks, and before that I had Mandrake 
10 betas and Release Candidates running on the same machine. 

Today, all of a sudden, I can't access any of my Samba shares over my 
network. I can see them listed in Windows Explorer -- but when I click on them, or 
try to map them, Explorer hangs for about 10 minutes. This happens on every 
computer connected to my network. 

I don't think I'm having a network problem. I can connect from every computer 
to the Linux Server via VNC. And my Mac OS X machines can all connect to the 
Linux Server via Appleshare File Protocol. But Samba seems to be dead. 

I tried a complete uninstall and reinstall of Samba to no avail. I did the 
following: 
Uninstalled the Samba rpms (server, client, common). 
Backed up and then Deleted the entire /etc/samba folder
Rebooted the Server (for no particular reason)
Reinstalled Samba 3.0.2 rpm
Changed the smb.conf file to what I had been using on my network for 6 months 
-- and deleted all but one share. 
Added one user/smbpasswd (I had deleted all the old info)
Started samba

Same problem. I can see the one share, but when I click on it my Windows 
Explorer crashes. 

Other apps keep running on the Windows Boxes, but it takes about 10 minutes 
to be able to get the taskbar back. 

I even changed the permissions on all the underlying files that are accessed 
in the samba share to have the owner of the username trying to access the 
share through samba. 

Does anybody have a clue what the trouble could be? I would appreciate some 
good advice. 

Thanks in advance,
Andy Liebman