samba - Oct 2002 - [ns]mbd, sync'ing of disks, and hdparm

Hi,

I run a little router/firewall that also acts as a print server for
the linux and win98 clients on the LAN. I have the harddisk configured
so that if there is little activity, it spins down (hdparm -S 12
/dev/hda).

I added smbd/nmbd today and with the two services running, the hard
disk drive spins down but wakes up about every 12 minutes. Without the
services, only a major event causes them to wake-up (daily cron,
login, etc).

My goal is to keep the hdd in sleep mode as much as possible.

1) Why is [ns]mbd checking the drive?

2) How do I make it stop doing this and only turn the drives on for a
   mandatory event (such as reading a file that is not cached)?

I am only using the box as a printserver as far as samba is concerned.

Thank you,

Elizabeth

John Benedetto <jbenedet@unm.edu> writes:
> I _think_ it might be Samba re-reading the smb.conf, though I am no expert,
> so you might want to see what other people on the list say...
> 
> Not sure how to tell you how to make it not do that...
Your response was much better than the others. Thank you. However,
after much experimentation, I have deduced that the file(s) that are
written out occasionally are the ones in nmbd's cache. On Debian,
these reside in:

   /var/cache/samba

To remedy the drive access, I mounted a ramdrive at the above mount
point and added support in the initializaton script (after "mkdir
/var/state/samba" manually):

CACHE_MOUNT_POINT=/var/cache/samba
STATE_RD_SAVE=/var/state/samba/cache.rd.gz

function ram_disk_start {
    if [ -e $STATE_RD_SAVE ] ; then
        # just copy it into the ramdisk
        gunzip -c $STATE_RD_SAVE | dd of=/dev/ram bs=1k count=256 2>/dev/null
        rm -f $STATE_RD_SAVE
    else
        # create an e2fs file system    
        dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ram bs=1k count=256 2> /dev/null
        mke2fs -vm0 /dev/ram 256 >/dev/null
    fi

    # and now mount it
    mount /dev/ram $CACHE_MOUNT_POINT
}

function ram_disk_stop {
    umount $CACHE_MOUNT_POINT
    dd if=/dev/ram bs=1k count=256 2>/dev/null | gzip -c > $STATE_RD_SAVE
}

case "$1" in
	start)
                modprobe rd
		echo -n "Starting Samba daemons:"
                ram_disk_start
		# (etc)	
	stop)
		# normal except for ending

                ram_disk_stop
		echo "."
		;;

	# etc

It's been running like this for about the last 6 hours and there have
been very few disk accesses that I recollect, maybe two.

Thank you,

Elizabeth