[Samba] problems with multiple linux boxes hitting WIN2000 shares, cifs cifs-1.20c-2.4, linux 2.4.27 kernel

[Joe]

We have a cluster of webservers running smbfs mounts.
I switched one box to cifs, 5 shares pointing at a Win2000,
Monday 11 Oct - a week ago. The box ran fine all week.
It is a moderate use production system - /proc/fs/cifs/Stats
reports several hundred thousand SMBs in a week.

Today I switched another box in the cluster to cifs.
Immediately both boxes began spewing errors like:
Oct 18 11:35:42 dlib2 kernel:  CIFS VFS: No response buffer
Oct 18 11:35:42 dlib2 last message repeated 2 times
Oct 18 11:35:42 dlib2 kernel:  CIFS VFS: Error -104 sending data on socket to server.
Oct 18 11:35:42 dlib2 kernel:  CIFS VFS: Error -32 sending data on socket to server.
Oct 18 11:35:42 dlib2 kernel:  CIFS VFS: Error 0xffffffe0 or on cifs_get_inode_info in lookup
Oct 18 11:35:42 dlib2 kernel:  CIFS VFS: No response buffer
Oct 18 11:35:42 dlib2 kernel:  CIFS VFS: No response buffer
Oct 18 11:35:42 dlib2 kernel:  CIFS VFS: Send error in Close = -11
Oct 18 11:36:50 dlib2 kernel:  CIFS VFS: No response buffer

Stats also shows: 2156 session 1688 share reconnects

One box finally gave up. I could not get apache to let go of the cifs
mounts. When I did a shutdown the box hung and I had to do a power cycle.

I switched the second box back to smbfs and now the first box is again
happily running cfis.

Any hints above how I can get both boxes to talk to the Win2000 server
at the same time? The WIN2000 event logs didn't pick up any errors.

Thanks, Joe Edwards
UW Libraries