UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

i am run SUSE 6.4 with apache that i built and maintain to serve my dads website, (www.farragutmarine.com for anyone who cares) anyway i am running samba and i have a huge problem, throughout the day, everything goes fine, but then my server will come to a grinding halt, if i try to telnet in or ftp to it, or get my email, i get NO responce, if i am lucky and do get a response it will take about 20 minutes for the prompt to come up after i log in, when i do a netstat -a i get a load of smb connections, and when i do a ps aux i get a whole list of
root 16249 1.0 1.6 3420 2120 ? S 18:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

root 16250 1.0 1.6 3420 2120 ? S 18:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

root 16251 1.0 1.6 3420 2120 ? S 18:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

root 16252 1.0 1.6 3420 2120 ? S 18:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

root 16253 0.0 1.6 3420 2120 ? S 18:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

root 16254 0.0 1.6 3420 2120 ? S 18:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

joe 16255 0.0 0.6 2452 884 pts/0 R 18:17 0:00 ps aux
root 16256 0.0 1.6 3420 2108 ? S 18:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

root 16257 0.0 1.6 3420 2108 ? S 18:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

root 16258 0.0 1.5 3284 1924 ? S 18:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D

root 16259 0.0 1.4 3148 1900 ? R 18:17 0:00 /usr/sbin/smbd -D




theres WAY more then that, to solve this temporarely (sp) i set up a CRON job to restart the samba servers 5 times a day, it works but it should not have to be that way, i did search for this problem on the boards, but if i overloooked another thread addressing this i apologize, any help with this will be very much appreaciated as this problem has kept me from installing samba on my nice new cleanly installed netbsd server. thank you.

any one at all? please?

Have you set your debug level to see if there is anything going on?

Answer the following:
Version of Samba:
How long have you been using it:
Upgrade or changes recently:
Did it always have this problem:
(If not, what changed?)

Have you looked at the man pages for it at Samba -

The following might help but you should check your log files first to try to figure out what is wrong (maybe set the debug level to 3 as recommended by the docs found at their web site)

deadtime (G)
The value of the parameter (a decimal integer) represents the number of minutes of inactivity before a connection is considered dead, and it is disconnected. The deadtime only takes effect if the number of open files is zero.

This is useful to stop a server's resources being exhausted by a large number of inactive connections.

Most clients have an auto-reconnect feature when a connection is broken so in most cases this parameter should be transparent to users.

Using this parameter with a timeout of a few minutes is recommended for most systems.

A deadtime of zero indicates that no auto-disconnection should be performed.

Default: deadtime = 0

Example: deadtime = 15

Found other folks with same problem (different OS) - looks like it has to do with problems between Samba and client software - the deadtime value may help

http://lists.samba.org/pipermail/sam...read.html#1101

thanks for the help, i set the dead time (idle time before disconnect?) to 2 min, and disabled my rediculous cron job, hopefully all will go well. i read the post on the samba website that rtm provided, it is very interesting that samba will react that way, and also does that mean that the way windows handles the smb prot. is wrong? anyway thats for the help.