[Samba] Pfr tmp files, FreeBSD and Linux

[Josh Kelley]

On 7/23/07, feelgravityspull at gmail.com <feelgravityspull at gmail.com> wrote:
> I currently have 2 samba servers (3.0.25a) one running FreeBSD 6.2 and the
> other running CentOS 5. Both are setup the same and using the same smb.conf.
> The FreeBSD server works great, no problems. The linux server works great
> too except on logout. When a user goes to logout, windows errors with
> "Windows was unable to save all the data for the file prf*.tmp. The data has
> been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware
> or network connection". The odd part is that about 90% of the profile is
> written to the users home directory but it becomes corrupt with it not being
> usable again. Again, if the profile points to the FreeBSD server, we have no
> problems at all. Both servers are mounting home directories via nfs.
>
> Has anyone seen this behavior before? Athough FreeBSD and Linux are
> different, is there really that big of a difference that would cause the
> above problem? Or am I missing something simple?

In my experience, adding "veto oplock files = /prf*.tmp/" helps make
profiles work more reliably.  YMMV.

Is anything logged to Windows' event log or to your Samba logs when
this happens?

Samba 3.0.25a has a few bugs related to its file change notify
support, and the release notes mention that that feature uses Linux's
inotify (which appears to not exist on FreeBSD).  So I might guess
that's what you're running into on your Linux server.  You might want
to try disabling that feature ("change notify = no", "kernel change
notify = no") or upgrading to Samba 3.0.25b plus the patch at
https://bugzilla.samba.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4796, which should contain
all of the bugfixes needed to make file change notify work reliably.

Josh Kelley