[Samba] How to detect active users

[Jefferson Davis]

I usually just use smbstatus. if I'm looking into a user issue, it's usually smbstatus | grep <userid>. Then I can get the PID and give it a kill -HUP to load new shares, etc, IF they don;t have any open files. 

----- Original Message -----

From: "Aaron E." <ssureshot at gmail.com> 
To: samba at lists.samba.org 
Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2011 6:21:28 AM 
Subject: Re: [Samba] How to detect active users 

clear the logs and monitor for a few days,, If there is not real 
activity just shut down the service and see if anyone complains they 
can't access something.. After a few days/weeks/months pull the server. 

Might not be the perfect scenario but if smbstatus isn't displaying what 
you need then this might make you feel better about it lol 

On 07/27/2011 04:33 AM, Malte Forkel wrote: 
> Am 26.07.2011 19:27, schrieb Jeremy Allison: 
>> On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 07:18:15PM +0200, Malte Forkel wrote: 
>>> Am 26.07.2011 19:08, schrieb John Drescher: 
>>>> On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Malte Forkel<malte.forkel at berlin.de> wrote: 
>>>>> Am 26.07.2011 18:42, schrieb Chris Weiss: 
>>>>>> On Tue, Jul 26, 2011 at 3:06 AM, Malte Forkel<malte.forkel at berlin.de> wrote: 
>>>>>>> Currently, I'm not even sure Samba preserves the kind of state 
>>>>>>> information required to detect the usage scenario I'm interested in. Is 
>>>>>>> there any concept of an "open file" in Windows/Samba, after all? May be 
>>>>>>> it depends on the application used to open the file? 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> yes, it depends on the application. If the app closes the file and 
>>>>>> leaves the share, samba honors that. if the app keeps the file handle 
>>>>>> open, samba does too. 
>>>>> 
>>>>> So an application (like SciTE) might open a file, read and display its 
>>>>> contents, and close the file while continuing to display it. And in 
>>>>> contrast, a different application might not close the file while it is 
>>>>> displaying its contents? 
>>>> 
>>>> Exactly. 
>>>> 
>>>> John 
>>> 
>>> Well, thanks to all of you for your help. 
>>> 
>>> In summary then, it looks to me like I won't be able to reliably detect 
>>> if there is any client out there who would be disappointed if the server 
>>> shuts down. 
>> 
>> Of course you will ! smbstatus does this as I keep repeating. 
>> If an application has opened and closed the file and keeps it 
>> in memory, then the user won't be disappointed if the server 
>> is shut down, they'll get an IO error on save and have to 
>> do a "save as" to a local (or other remote) drive. 
>> 
>> If an application keeps the file open (so it's not safely 
>> stored in memory) then smbstatus will show this and you 
>> don't shut the server down. 
>> 
>> You seem to think there's some "magic" option that will 
>> show you client intent, not client activity. 
>> 
>> Client activity is all you need to care about, and smbstatus 
>> show you this. Doesn't matter if applications are running 
>> or not, whether that have actual files open is all that 
>> matters. 
>> 
>> Jeremy. 
> 
> Well, I guess some people get disappointed more easily than others :-) 
> 
> I understand that users won't loose any data if the server shuts down 
> and they "save as" their changes. But having to re-synchronize those 
> files with those on the server once it is up again is something I'd like 
> to avoid. 
> 
> Plus, the open files (from a user perspective) might just be an 
> indicator that the user would like to use other capabilities of the 
> server as well. E.g., he might do remote development of an application 
> on the server using Eclipse on the Windows machine. If I found out that 
> the server had shut down when I try to compile a new version (implicitly 
> saving changed files before), I'd be disappointed. 
> 
> Malte 
> 
> 

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