[Samba] XP clients hang on accessing certain directories

[Adam Goldman]

Hi all. I'm trying to debug a strange Samba/WinXP problem, but I don't
know much about Windows or CIFS, so any insight from anyone would be
much appreciated. Here's the situation:

The initial problem was that clicking on certain directories on an
XP Pro SP2 client would cause the client to freeze for a few minutes
and then complain that the directory is inaccessable. This problem was
also reported with NT clients, but 98 seems to be happy. Changing the
max protocol to LANMAN2 doesn't help. Disabling the web client service
on the client doesn't help.

I noted that the problem was also exhibited by NET USE'ing the share
from a command prompt and then trying to DIR the "bad" directories.
The client would hang for a while and then report no files in the
directory.

It's relatively consistent that certain directories will trigger the
problem and other directories are fine. I don't notice anything too
unusual about the "bad" directories.

This problem was first observed with an early 3.0.x version of Samba on
a Linux 2.4.x machine. I upgraded to 3.0.21b from the Debian package, no
change.

Strangely enough, tarring up the "bad" directory tree and dropping it on
another Samba 3.0.21b server doesn't seem to reproduce the problem.

tcpdump seems to indicate that Samba is sending a FINDFIRST response that
the client is ignoring, but I may be misreading things.

Here are some logs:

relevant portion of log.smbd at debug level 10:
http://www.eskimo.com/~adam/samba/noogie.log.smbd.trimmed

binary libpcap capture of relevant packets, after setting samba to use
port 139 so tcpdump recognizes them as smb:
http://www.eskimo.com/~adam/samba/noogie.tcpdump

textual version of tcpdump capture, at varying verbosity levels:
http://www.eskimo.com/~adam/samba/noogie.tcpdump.text-r
http://www.eskimo.com/~adam/samba/noogie.tcpdump.text-vr
http://www.eskimo.com/~adam/samba/noogie.tcpdump.text-vvr

timestamps of what i was doing, for correlation with above logs:
http://www.eskimo.com/~adam/samba/noogie-tests

Hopefully there is someone out there who this makes more sense to than
it does to me... I will be looking forward to any suggestions as to where
to go from here.

-- Adam