[Samba] HP Toolbox kills Samba

[Jeremy Allison]

On Mon, Oct 02, 2006 at 10:49:37PM -0400, John Smith wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>     I've encountered the following problem at a client.  The problem results 
> in one or more of the smbd processing continuously grabbing more and more 
> memory until the system runs out of memory or just becomes unusable due to a 
> low memory condition.  This error is extremely serious as the entire server 
> is eventually brought down by one error.
> 
>     After debugging this error at the site several times I have successfully 
> narrowed down the cause of this error to HP's toolbox.  HP's toolbox is a 
> background process their full driver package runs for their multifunctional 
> scanner/fax/printers 3015, 3050, and others.  Funny enough these printers 
> are all local and should not have affected Samba but apparently their 
> toolbox is doing some kind of checking on the server.  The runaway smbd 
> processes were all connected to machines running the HP toolbox.
> 
>     Initially I encountered this error on systems using the 3015 printer. 
> At the time the resolution I found was to make sure to have a matching user 
> on the server so the machine did not connect as guest.  This pretty much 
> took care of the problem at the time.  This first problem also took about a 
> day or so before the machine managed to bog down the server to an unusable 
> state.

This could be related to a Windows bug where a client will continuously
loop polling the printer - I recall there is a hotfix for this ? (Can't
remember the bugid, sorry). I'm not aware of any memory leaks in smbd
in this area though. Jerry might recollect better.

Jeremy.