I installed a samba server about a week ago for a client and have been
having some trouble with it. The two problems that occur are:
1. The "Microsoft mail postoffice" occasionally has files with
deny_all
locks on them that prevent other users from sending email to the user.
My first impression was that this was an Outlook issue, but rebooting
the entire (client) computer does not unstick the problem. The only
thing to do seems to be to kill the connection from SWAT.
2. One particular program (called TimeKeeper from a company named
Kronos) is continually locking up. It appears that it's opening db
files, then somehow it loses track of this. On occasion we've even seen
the drive mapping disappear completely on the client end. Very strange.
This program was reasonably trouble-free while running through a Novell
4.11 server.
This is samba 2.0.7 on FreeBSD 4.2-STABLE using Windows 95 as the
client.
We've tried tweaking the deadtime parameter (including turning it
completely off) as well as the keepalive parameter, with no noticable
improvement. The only thing we've tried that seemed to help is to have
the client machine continually pinging the server while the application
was running. This drastically reduced the number of lock-ups, but didn't
prevent them.
In the queue to be tried is the so_keepalive socket option, as well as
running a tcpdump to try to capture some details of the problem.
My main questions are:
1. Will so_keepalive help any? Does Windows 95 even support it (or the
samba keepalive packets, for that matter)?
2. Does anyone have any suggestions on further debugging?
3. Has anyone seen this type of behaviour before and know the reason. If
the Kronos application is the problem, it would be nice to have details
of it to send to Kronos to force them to fix it.
TIA,
Bill