[Samba] The case of the disconnecting network shares

[Jeremy Allison]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 02:48:21PM +1100, John Gardeniers wrote:
> We recently completed our Samba 3 to Samba 4 transition without too
> many serious problems but one rather annoying issue has cropped up
> since the migration. Network shares on our file server become
> disconnected overnight, whether idle or not. This was never a
> problem with Samba 3 but since upgrading Samba on the server to
> version 4 and joining it to the Samba 4 AD domain this problem is
> happening most, but not all, nights. This is merely a minor nuisance
> for most of our staff but is a serious problem for those who need to
> run overnight jobs over those shares. The inconsistency makes it
> even more puzzling.
> 
> We have set the auto disconnect time to -1 to disable it on all
> clients but that has made absolutely no difference. Samba itself
> shows nothing in the logs that suggests there was any sort of
> problem during the night and I have not been able to ascertain
> whether all clients get disconnected at the same time or whether it
> occurs at various times.
> 
> Can anyone shed any light on this and suggest possible reasons
> and/or solutions?

If you mean "deadtime" the default is zero, and that
means don't disconnect.

Try getting a wireshark trace around the disconnect,
if that's possible. That should tell you if it's the
client or server initiating the disconnect.