[Samba] Intermittent process crash serving files

[Jeremy Allison]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 02:50:34PM -0400, Tom Ronayne wrote:
> We have been using SAMBA for file/print servers and domain controllers 
> in Windows networks for several years.  At one site, we have 
> intermittent problems in which the connection to the SAMBA server 
> appears to die: i.e., no one can connect to the share, and the Windows 
> clients (Terminal Servers and workstations) apparently keep re-trying to 
> connect which ultimately locks up those clients.
> 
> They have about 20 or so users, mostly doing MS Office stuff, opening 
> one very large MS Access database (around 400 Mb) and using a lot of 
> Outlook PST files - some over 1 Gb each. All of this data, as well as 
> their roaming profiles, is stored in the 'base' share listed in smb.conf.
> 
> We have noticed in many cases, but not all, that there is an error in 
> /var/log/messages indicating that the samba process had an error and 
> apparently the process exits.  I've included a sample from 
> /var/log/messages.  In this case, we are using (2) Windows 2000 Terminal 
> Servers, as well as one XP workstation.  The OS on the SAMBA server is: 
> Mandrake (Linux version 2.6.3-7mdk-p3-smp-64GB 
> (nplanel at n3.mandrakesoft.com) (gcc version 3.3.2 (Mandrake Linux 10.0 
> 3.3.2-6mdk)) #1 SMP Wed Mar 17 15:34:39 CET 2004), and the SAMBA version 
> is: 3.0.2a.  We also had the same problem using Fedora (Linux version 
> 2.6.9-1.667smp (bhcompile at dolly.build.redhat.com) (gcc version 3.4.2 
> 20041017 (Red Hat 3.4.2-6.fc3)) #1 SMP Tue Nov 2 15:09:11 EST 2004) with 
> SAMBA 3.0.8pre1-0.pre1.3.

These versions (3.0.2a and 3.0.8 - a *pre* release no less !) are
rather old. Would it be possible to update them to the production
3.0.22 release to see if these problems have already been fixed ?

Jeremy.