samba - May 2002 - Samba Panic Directive

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone could tell me the exact definition of Samba's
'Panic' directive.

We run samba as a domain controller on a Solaris box, but it
periodically falls over with a number of different symptoms (samba
process hogging all CPU, hogging memory, dozens and dozens of samba
processes constantly spawned or sometimes for no apparent reason at
all).

We've had a look at a number of solutions, but havn't been able to find
the problem (I personally suspect it may be something to do with solaris
with samba...I'd like to run the domain controller from a linux / BSD
box for a while see if the problem replicates...but its not my call :)
). The next best thing would be to get the server to mail out or better
yet, restart itself when samba falls over.

Hence the panic directive is of interest to me. Would the above qualify
as samba panicking? Is there a set trigger for the panic directive to be
invoked?

If anyone knows (other than try it and see...which I don't want to do as
the service is disrupted enough as it is without me throwing in more
random configuration options when I don't really understand what they're
doing) please let me know.

Thanks in advance,

Kev

On Mon, 6 May 2002, Kevin Tomlinson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I was wondering if anyone could tell me the exact definition of Samba's
> 'Panic' directive.
It is a command that is executed when smbd is about to 
dump core.
> We run samba as a domain controller on a Solaris box, but it
> periodically falls over with a number of different symptoms (samba
> process hogging all CPU, hogging memory, dozens and dozens of samba
> processes constantly spawned or sometimes for no apparent reason at
> all).
> 
> We've had a look at a number of solutions, but havn't been able to
find
> the problem (I personally suspect it may be something to do with solaris
> with samba...I'd like to run the domain controller from a linux / BSD
> box for a while see if the problem replicates...but its not my call :)
> ). The next best thing would be to get the server to mail out or better
> yet, restart itself when samba falls over.
The panic action is really for debugging, not to act as a watch dog.
Something like

	panic action = "/bin/sleep 9999"

would then allow you to attach to crashed process with gdb and 
figure out what went wrong.  You need to compile with -g
for this to be of any help.












cheers, jerry
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