[Samba] Writing operations to a Samba share fail

[Elias Knuutila]

  Hi,

I have a problem with Samba occasionally starting to fail with any write
operations to a public share. When Samba is started clean, everything
works OK. Then at some stage some users start to experience errors
trying to write into a share. At the same time other users may not
perceive any problems.

smb.conf or any other configurations of the server hasn't been changed
for a long time, but the problems just began to appear. According the
smb.conf most users have read-write access to the shares they can gain
access to.  In a faulty condition resource manager of Windows XP clients
hang from several seconds to about a minute or so, trying to do an
operation. Then various error messages from "File does not exist" to
"Permission denied" or something about lost connections follows.
Nevertheless, user can manage to create a dummy file or copy of file to
a share, but those are not created completely. Size of created copy of
document, for example, matches roughly original, but copy is somehow
incomplete and can't be opened. Or sometimes a file can be deleted.

System is Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 with Samba version
3.0.22-13.23-SUSE-SLES10. Filesystem Reiserfs, with about plenty of free
space, RAID. Simultaneous connected clients up to ~15. Samba is also a
primary domain controller. Users log on it to authenticate into the
domain, with local (not roaming) profiles. No problems have appeared
with this.

Samba log and strace shows errors that are not very helpful to me.
Following error messages are found in log.smbd:

error packet at smbd/notify.c(55) cmd=160 (SMBnttrans) NT_STATUS_CANCELLED
error packet at smbd/trans2.c(2629) cmd=50 (SMBtrans2)
NT_STATUS_OBJECT_NAME_NOT_FOUND
error packet at smbd/nttrans.c(652) cmd=162 (SMBntcreateX)
NT_STATUS_OBJECT_PATH_NOT_FOUND
error packet at smbd/nttrans.c(95) cmd=160 (SMBnttrans)
NT_STATUS_NOT_A_REPARSE_POINT
error packet at smbd/nttrans.c(652) cmd=162 (SMBntcreateX)
NT_STATUS_OBJECT_PATH_NOT_FOUND
error packet at smbd/nttrans.c(764) cmd=162 (SMBntcreateX)
NT_STATUS_FILE_IS_A_DIRECTORY


  Any help is appreciated.

  -Elias-