Hello,
first of all, thanks to everyone who has responded to my questions lately. All
pointers are as always much appreciated.
That said, I have now narrowed down (and solved, sort of) the problem with the
mysterious "freeze effect"[1] I've been posting about. To put it
in short
terms:
X = original smb.conf that's worked fine for a long time up until a power
outtage efter which we started having the "freeze" problems
Y = X, except all occurrences of "valid users = ..." commented out.
Y works, X does not. That is, when I switch to Y and restart samba, I can no
longer reproduce the freeze effect.
The long story is that as part of debugging this problem we set up a new samba
instance in a chroot on the same server. At first it appeared that it worked
perfectly, while the real instance would exhibit the freeze problems even
with a as-vanilla-as-possible configuration.
After awhile, I thought the problelm on the real instance had mysteriously
solved itself, when we were testing a vanilla-ish configuration on it. But
then, after having copied back some of the real share configurations, the
problem came back.
We eventually narroed it down such that we were able to reproduce the problem
with the "test share" having a specific definition, and not with a
slighty
modified one. Here's the exact definition of the "public" share we
have, in
working order:
[Public]
path = /home/samba/public
public = no
; valid users = @melacure
force group = melacure
force create mode = 0770
force directory mode = 0770
writable = yes
printable = no
Now, if I remove the semi-colon on the valid users line, the login script
(which maps this drive among others) will start hanging when mapping this
particular drive (not always, but perhaps 1/3 of the time). Similarly, if I
leave it commented out but have other drives with a "valid users"
statement,
it will hang on those drives, but not others.
I mention this because logging in repeatedly and seeing if the login script
hangs is the one consistently working way we have had of reproducing the
freeze effect, but in practice it occurs when logged in aswell, but seemingly
more randomly.
We have not yet had time to try "valid users" statements listing
specific
users and no groups...
In any case, it seems like a very weird thing to cause these problems (no
wonder we had trouble figuring it out). I really don't know what conclusions
to draw from this. If anyone is enlightened by this information, please share
:)
[1] Basically, the client will freeze every now and then, hanging explorer
(i.e. the desktop, start menu, etc) until it becomes "unstuck" 20-40
seconds
or so later. Sometimes even the task manager cannot be brought up when this
happens. These freezes happens every now and then when accessing network
shares, and also when the login script runs during login (but not as often /
consistently if the same script is manually run after login). This happens
quite often on all 30-40 client computers on the network ever since a power
outtage and reboot of the server.
--
/ Peter Schuller, InfiDyne Technologies HB
PGP userID: 0xE9758B7D or 'Peter Schuller
<peter.schuller@infidyne.com>'
Key retrival: Send an E-Mail to getpgpkey@scode.org
E-Mail: peter.schuller@infidyne.com Web: http://www.scode.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: signature
Url :
http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/attachments/20030210/b30ac71e/attachment.bin
