We have a reasonably complicated network setup and have been suffering an ongoing problem for over a year. I have been working with Microsoft tech support on the problem and so far we have been unable to find the cause. I recently gathered some information to indicate that samba is involved. Any help is greatly appreciated. NT: About 20 Windows NT 4.0SP3 Pentium workstations with one PDC and one BDC. The PDC offers file, printer and application service. UNIX: About 20 SunOS/Solaris workstations with two Sparc5 servers. One runs SunOS and the other Solaris. Both are running Samba 1.9.16p10 The Problem: When users log in, a login script mounts four drives, two from the NT file server and one from each of the Sun servers. Users frequently run applications which reside on the NT shared drives, anything from PFE to Netscape and MSOffice. Periodically, these applications will just exit unexpectedly. This problem has been persisting for over a year. Through an enormous amount of debugging and testing it looks as though something is causing the redirector to dismount and remount the NT shares causing the applications to think the connection was lost. Part of the catch was that there seemed to be nothing I could do to force an occurrence of these "dropouts". Recently however I was able to find such a situation. I have removed the Samba mounts from the login scripts and now allow them to be mounted as a result of the user profile. This causes all the applications in the startup group which reside on the NT app server to die immediately. I use to experience these dropouts at least once a day. Since I have stopped using Samba to mount the drives on my workstation, I no longer have this problem although it persists for other users. I have been up and running now for quite some time, but if I open a command prompt and so much as net view the samba server, the applications I am running on the NT server will fail. I really hope not to get a lot of responses for simple things involving NT or hardware. This is not tied to any one Ethernet card or video card or brand of computer, for instance. I spent a week taking network usage data to rule out a network load problem. We are running 10Mb Ethernet over coax and the problem is as likely to happen at 10% utilization as at 80%. Microsoft has looked at several miles of network trace sessions between the NT client and the NT server and there doesn't appear to be anything wrong there either. They would like to see similar network traces between the NT client and the samba server and I plan to set that up soon. I did want to post this here though to see if anyone else has experienced this problem. I posted this question a year ago without any response. My hope is that with the increased usage of samba over the recent past, someone has encountered and fixed this little annoyance. It might just be something simple and configurable with samba that I have overlooked and suggestions of that nature would be welcome. Until now I hadn't looked at samba as the cause of the problem, so not much research has been done on that front. Again, your help is greatly appreciated as I would much prefer to continue using Samba over an NFS solution. -- Recuerde--nunca vuelva a utilizar el mismo perservativo /* Jeffery G. Smith, MCSE, smithj@pobox.com * * BS-RHIT, MS-OSU, DJ-WMHD (aka Doc. Insomnia) * * Physics Computer Support Team * * http://pobox.com/~smithj/ */