[Samba] Samba-to-Samba connection problems

[Brandon Laing]

Hey list,

I'm still having some issues getting 2 Fedora machines running Samba 3.0.7 to stay connected for any length of time. My setup looks like
this: 1 of the systems is set up as a Samba Server as the main fileserver. I have some Windows XP machines connecting to it just fine, nice
and fast. However, I also have some FC2 systems that connect to it using the smbfs filesystem, and while they work initially after booting
up, any amount of browsing through Nautilus or trying to run some programs off of the network will cause the system to hang. Not lock up,
as I can force close windows, but the system will not respond to anything else. It definitely appears to be an issue with Samba however,
and primarily when connecting from another FC2 system. Also, if the client system does hang while browsing the share, if I open a terminal
window and try to do anything, I will sometimes get an error like this: 

error: failed to stat: /mnt: Input/output error

Now, I'm thinking that this is only happening on the new version of Samba, 3.0.7-2.FC2 or 3.0.7-2.FC1. I noticed this started to happen around Sep 15th, after a system auto-updated to the newest version. Shortly after, other FC and FC2 boxes started having connection
troubles. So, to test this, I set up a new system and didn't update samba on it. Sure enough, works perfectly, no hang ups. Ok, so I'll try the
newest version directly from samba.org, 3.0.7-1 on the server. Hangs up within a minute of browsing on that one, same as the 3.0.7-2.FC2
release. Unfortunately, these are production boxes and I can't really wipe them out and reinstall to get the older version back. 

So, this really seems to be a bug in the most recent release of Samba. I've tried multiple, freshly installed servers and clients now, and can
always reproduce this error. It's making things very difficult for us as well, as we have multiple servers that communicate via Samba that
suddenly aren't working after they update. Luckily, Windows boxes are not affected by this and are connecting to Samba machines just fine.

So, has anyone else experienced this, or know of any potential workarounds? I can post smb.conf files if need be, although I'm using pretty
much all defaults and am just setting up simple shares. This setup has been working now for over a year without a hitch. Just to get things
working on some critical boxes, I've had to set up NFS shares just to keep the connection alive, as using Samba it freeze up and lose the
connection within a matter of hours. 

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Brandon