samba - Aug 2009 - "inotify_handler No data on inotify fd?"

I've got a samba server that's occasionally spewing inotify errors.

The classic, "smbd/notify_inotify.c:inotify_handler No data on inotify
fd?" type errors solved by
kernel change notify = false

Now, everything is working perfectly on this box unless one or two
users leave files open from specific machines (this is as far as I can
tell, it's hard to get good info from the users sometimes, but it's
what the logs indicate).

Because of this, I would rather not put in the "kernel change notify
false" line, so I'm wondering if there's another good solution.

When I logged into the server, lsof told me the offending client had a
single Excel file open about 1300 times, and I found their samba
process had been running for 14 hours.

What if I set limits, lets say hard and soft limits for open files to
512, or 128, and cpu time limits of 4 hours or so.
Would that cause issues for my users?
Would that have killed the misbehaving client, or at least kept it
from choking my system?
Will samba behave OK, if a user's samba process runs out of open file
handles, or will it instead fill my logs even faster?

Thanks
--Kyle

> -----Original Message-----
> From: samba-bounces at lists.samba.org
[mailto:samba-bounces at lists.samba.org]
> On Behalf Of Kyle Schmitt
> Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 8:07 AM
> To: samba
> Subject: [Samba] "inotify_handler No data on inotify fd?"
> 
> I've got a samba server that's occasionally spewing inotify errors.
> 
> The classic, "smbd/notify_inotify.c:inotify_handler No data on inotify
> fd?" type errors solved by
> kernel change notify = false
> 
> Now, everything is working perfectly on this box unless one or two
> users leave files open from specific machines (this is as far as I can
> tell, it's hard to get good info from the users sometimes, but it's
> what the logs indicate).
> 
> Because of this, I would rather not put in the "kernel change notify
> false" line, so I'm wondering if there's another good
solution.
> 
> When I logged into the server, lsof told me the offending client had a
> single Excel file open about 1300 times, and I found their samba
> process had been running for 14 hours.
> 
> What if I set limits, lets say hard and soft limits for open files to
> 512, or 128, and cpu time limits of 4 hours or so.
> Would that cause issues for my users?
> Would that have killed the misbehaving client, or at least kept it
> from choking my system?
> Will samba behave OK, if a user's samba process runs out of open file
> handles, or will it instead fill my logs even faster?
> 
> Thanks
> --Kyle

On Wed, Aug 05, 2009 at 09:06:50AM -0500, Kyle Schmitt
wrote:
> When I logged into the server, lsof told me the offending client had a
> single Excel file open about 1300 times, and I found their samba
> process had been running for 14 hours.
This is the second time someone reports a mad excel. If
there was a way to reproduce this here, I would be very
happy...

Volker
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