Samba server freezes

[dkw]

Hi Peter:

I had the same problems with a machine running Samba
Version 2.2.6pre2.  I am using fbsd 4.7.  The box would just hang 
completely.  I could only reset the power to get a response.  The 
problem began after I started using a windows box as a 
router/gateway/proxy.  I also use DHCPD & think that was causing the 
problem.  The windows box was trying to DHCP up but it had a static 
address on the inside (it seemed like the outside/internet interface was 
asking the inside/LAN interface for an IP.  Somehow I think that was 
killing my freebsd server.  I had repeated requests in my dhcpd log & it 
seemed that all my leases were used up but no hosts were
connected to the network that were dynamic...  Before I started using 
the windows box as my gateway, I had uptimes close to 6 months with my 
samba freebsd box.  It is a pentium 133 with 64 MB RAM.

I recompiled my kernel to test the hardware & found no problems.  They
(unix geeks) say that recompiling is a perfect hardware test for memory
& CPU, etc.   You may want to try this.  This will simulate heavy load
on the box & help discover any flaky hardware.

Well, the problem went away as mysteriously as it started.  I updated my
DHCPD server to the latest version that ISC was offering & I made sure
my ISA windows server was not asking for dhcp on the internal network.
My box has been running steadily for 30 days now.  Probably, it was my
error on misconfiguring the stupid windoze server.

I think I may have had too many file descriptors opened or something, 
but I don't know enough about that to determine the validity.  I 
probably needed to get a core dump, but am not sure how to turn that 
feature on or where to look.  The system & samba logs indicated no 
problems before the thing stopped responding.

Best of luck!

Regards,
dkw

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Message: 17
Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2003 15:49:20 +0100 (CET)
From: Peter Ulrich Kruppa <root at pukruppa.de>
Subject: Samba server freezes
To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
Message-ID: <20031201154111.S1722 at pukruppa.net>
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII

Hi!

Sometimes - particularily over the weekends - our samba server at
school stops working.
Sometimes it's only the smbd daemon, sometimes the whole system
doesn't react anymore.
After a reboot or a restart of smbd everything works fine again.

What might be the reasons for this behaviour? - I can't see any
error messages on the screen.
Would it make sense to set up a cron job that does a reboot in
the early morning?

Thanks for any ideas.

Regards,

Uli.


	+---------------------------+
	|    Peter Ulrich Kruppa    |
         |         Wuppertal         |
         |          Germany          |
         +---------------------------+

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