[Samba] CreateHardLink problem

[Jeremy Allison]

On Tue, Mar 03, 2009 at 06:13:42PM +1100, David Overton wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm developing a Windows backup application that needs to be able to
> create possibly hundreds of thousands of hard links on an SMB share.
> I'm running into a strange problem when that share happens to be on a
> Samba server.  When the application tries to create the 10000th hard
> link, the win32 CreateHardLink() function returns error code 5 "Access
> is denied".  The Samba log shows:
> 
> [2009/03/03 01:29:08,  0] smbd/files.c:file_new(79)
>   ERROR! Out of file structures
> 
> Some googling suggested that the "out of file structures" error occurs
> when Samba exceeds its max open files limit.  Sure enough, if I change
> "max open files" in smb.conf, the number of successful calls to
> CreateHardLink() before the error occurs changes accordingly.
> 
> Configurations I've tried this on:
> QNAP NAS device running Linux 2.6.12 (ARM) and Samba 3.0.23d
> Ubuntu Server 8.10 running Linux 2.6.27 (i686) and Samba 3.2.3.
> Both of these with Windows Vista as client.
> 
> Several of our customers have reported this bug with different
> versions of Linux/Samba on the server and different versions of
> Windows on the client, so it seems to be a widespread problem.
> 
> Has anyone encountered this problem before?  I'm not sure whether it
> is a bug in Samba or Windows?
> I'm new to this list.  Is this the right place to report this or would
> it be better to submit a Bugzilla report?
> Any idea what I can do to work around it, other than setting "max open
> files" to a ridiculously high value?

Can you open a bug and attach a debug level 10 log and also
a wireshark capture trace of this against the Samba share ?

Thanks,

Jeremy.