[Samba] Samba hanging

[Philip Washington]

On 3 occasions in the last 2 week  my  samba server has hung up.  It has 
occurred each time when I am  trying to do a full backup copy of the 
file server. 

It appears to be happening at the same place, I'm guessing based on the 
number of files which are being transfered.    When I look at the rsync 
which is running  I just see a long line of files with I/O errors.

When I try to shutdown smb, I can't.
#service smb stop
Shutting down smb   [Failed]
Shutting down nmb   [Failed]

When I look at
#ps -aux|grep smbd
I get a long list of pid's.  Whenever I try to kill one of these pid's with
kill xxxxx
or kill -9 xxxxx
or kill -15 xxxxx
killall smbd

nothing happens.  I then have to reboot.  I have been running this 
system for 2 years and it just started this.  Any ideas?