samba - Jan 2004 - Strange! smbd dies intermittently with no logging

Dear list,
this one is quite strange. It has happened on my own server a few days ago
that the smbd process terminates silently when I write a file to the samba
server.
It never happens when reading, it is completely independent from the amount
of traffic and it occurs several times a day in odd intervals.
I ran smbd with a log level of 3, just to see what I already have seen in
syslog (level 1): from time to time, when opening a file for writing, the
smbd process disappears and a new one is forked in the same moment, with the
effect that the file that should be written to ends up at zero bytes size
(no difference between exisiting and newly created files) and various
messages from windows (file does not exist, file locked by someone else and
others). I ran samba-2.2.7a self-compiled, but have switched to the 2.2.8a
rpm from suse, which didn't change anything. The server was running in daily
production use (approx 3-10GB traffic a day) since august 03 and started
misbehaving around christmas. It happens on any disk, the scsi disks as well
as the ide disks. I did not change anything when the problem occured first.
OS: SuSE Linux 8.2, Kernel 2.4.10, Samba 2.2.8a from rpm, Pentium III
machine with 768MB RAM, 3com NIC, IBM SCSI disks and WD+Maxtor IDE disks.
The system log does not show any anomalies, only the reconnecting clients
without prior disconnect (due to dying smbd procs)
I have just tried to provoke failures by copying folders with some hundred
thousand files via samba, nothing. I downloaded a new SuSE distribution (7
GB) and encountered one smbd failure in the meantime. It seems more likely
to happen when downloading single files from the internet (one write access
every few seconds to minutes), while copying vast amounts of data doesn't
cause that much trouble.

Any idea where to look for the problem?
I have thought about building Samba 3, but I don't have the time the next
two weeks, but we need the server.

regards
Stefan Huebner
mail@huebner-informationselektronik.de
IT niche solutions - consulting and trade