[Samba] Samba logs fill up disk with inotify errors, smbd 100% CPU

[Günter Kukkukk]

Am Dienstag, 17. März 2009 schrieb Stephane Carre:
> Hello,
> One of the server I maintain has Ubuntu 8.04 LTS server with samba 
> 3.0.28a. Kernel version is 2.6.24-16-server. The samba setup for this 
> server is a workgroup environment, with user level security.
> At least once a week, sometimes more often, the server becomes 
> unavailable because the system disk is full. It appears that the samba 
> logs are the problem. Although the samba configuration file indicates 
> that logs should be limited to 1000K, one of the machine specific logs 
> (/var/log/samba/log.machine_xyz.old) grows to the point of entirely 
> filling the disk (140 GB of log). The log file contains endless 
> repetitions of the same message:
> smbd/notify_inotify.c:inotify_handler(240) No data on inotify fd?!
> At the same time, the smbd process for the user related to the faulty 
> machine log uses 100% CPU, and must be stopped with kill -9. Note that 
> it not always the same machine that creates the problem.
> Because some users are never affecting the system, we tried to identify 
> if the origin of the problem was linked to a specific data manipulation 
> by some of the 'bad' users, but we are still clueless.
> I found some info in this list with similarities to my problem where the 
> suggestion is to include "notify:inotify = false" in [global] to see if 
> it helps (http://www.mail-archive.com/samba%40lists.samba.org/msg98074.html)
> I've just done this, so I will have to wait and see.
> Otherwise, would you have any idea or suggestion ?
> Any help would be greatly appreciated.
> 

looks like a buggy kernel. There have been kernel issues with inotify:
  http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=655504
  https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=463372
Google will return more results...

Cheers, Günter