I have the very same problem with samba 3.0.14a running on Debian Sarge and
have found no solution yet. Has anyone found a solution in the meanwhile?
Could it perhaps be due to a failure in our networking hardware?
> We've seen Samba crash and burn twice in the last 48 hours - it just
> started happening, and we have no idea what might be causing it. I'm
> hoping that someone will recognize this problem.
> Platform: we are running RedHat Enterprise Server, with Samba 3.0.7.
> We're using security=domain in an old-style NT4 domain environment.
> The symptom that we're seeing is that the number of smbd processes
> suddenly begins to increase. We normally run with betwen 100 and 150 smb
> processes, but when Samba fails, the number starts to increase quickly,
> and users start to have problems accessing files.
> smbstatus reports approximately the right number of clients (133), but ps
> shows a much larger number of smbd processes active (680). Smbstatus
> reports a list of active smbd processes - this list includes the oldest
> processes and the newest processes, but there is a block of smbd processes
> in the middle that are not in the smbstatus report. What we THINK is
> happening is that the smbd processes begin to hang, the clients time out,
> they initiate a new session with Samba server, which respawns another smbd
> server process (leaving the old, hung process running). This keeps
> happening over and over until we kill samba. The hung processes need to
> be kill -9'ed.
