samba - Nov 2008 - Samba spawning excessive smbd processes.

Hi,

We're running Samba (3.0.28-1.el5_2.1) on a Redhat (5.2) server using 
winbind to authenticate against a Windows AD.

This all worked fine for a while. But now we have the problem that 
(some) users coming from Linux clients cause an excessive amount of smbd 
processes. We had 1 user who had more than 1700 smbd processes all 
coming from the same client. While on the client side there where only a 
few cifs processes running.

All these processes are not responding to a normal kill. They have no 
more connection to the client what so ever and have to be killed with a 
kill -9.

Does anyone out there have had the same experiences or does someone know 
the solution to our problem? Please let me know.


Bye,
Marco.

On Sat, Nov 08, 2008 at 06:28:42PM +0100, Marco van Putten
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> We're running Samba (3.0.28-1.el5_2.1) on a Redhat (5.2) server using  
> winbind to authenticate against a Windows AD.
>
> This all worked fine for a while. But now we have the problem that  
> (some) users coming from Linux clients cause an excessive amount of smbd  
> processes. We had 1 user who had more than 1700 smbd processes all  
> coming from the same client. While on the client side there where only a  
> few cifs processes running.
>
> All these processes are not responding to a normal kill. They have no  
> more connection to the client what so ever and have to be killed with a  
> kill -9.
Attach to these processes using strace -p <pid> and find out what
they're up to. Also try attaching with gdb <attach> command and
get a back trace. Don't forget to load the symbol tables also.

This should give some clue as to what is going on.

Jeremy.