The Samba Dance...

[ScottishCaptain]

Greetings to all!

I'm finding myself that recently I have to do a little dance to get Samba working over my network. Not quite sure whats going on here, its been doing this since day one and frankly its getting annoying.

This problem is also the only reason why I'm holding off another computer from running FC4/Arcserve as my office's backup server, because of this share problem.

I'm using the Samba config utility under Gnome included with Fedora. I set everything up, and it works fine. I have a user setup for it, my shares setup, all is hunky dorey.

I can navigate to the machines as they show up on the Wintel boxes, and I've mounted the drives off my particular server (Dual Opteron) as network drives (X: and Z.

Here is the problem. If the shares idle for a while, I seem to "loose" connection. The Wintel boxes start complaining that they can't find the network share, and that the network connection via the network drive wasn't restored (blah :P). I cannot browse to the machine simply by going through Network Neighborhood, it isn't there anymore.

Now, I do the Samba dance. I go over to my server, which has mysteriously stopped sharing via Samba, open the "Samba" Config utility under the Gnome menu, and basically just click on whatever. Go look at the server settings, etc. Then I exit the config utility.

Now, strangly enough, the server is working again, I can access the shares and the Wintel boxes will reconnect (after a few seconds). It shows up under Network Neighborhood. Everything is happy once again.

Until the server idles for a bit, then "Samba" seems to go to sleep and never wakes up unless I poke it with the Config utility.

I really don't like walking over to the server and poking Samba every time it dozes off like this. I've read some obscure information about this problem, but I can't remember where or what it was...

Any ideas?

Thanks!
Keven Tipping

[gavinw6662]

could it be an issue with the opteron chips?? I sure don't have this problem with my samba config. How about posting up your config file so that we can have a look at it.

[Zigzagcom]

I wouldn't like to go poking lions all the time either, LOL.
Anyway, I was wondering if it might have something to do with priority settings for
which machine is the master browser...just a thought.

[ScottishCaptain]

It isn't the opterons.. The machine is brand new- it was put together this Summer.

The machine has been running for months dead straight without any problems. I upgraded to 2.6.13 which fixed all the ACPI/APM problems, and its been running 24/7 ever since. It runs dual 244's, with 512mb RAM.

I'm not sure what you mean by a "master browser"- I haven't looked into Samba/Windows sharing that much.. Usually I just use the FC4 GUI Config and away we go.

I will post my smb.conf when I get back home today.

Thanks!

[Mechamaniac]

I think the problem is "Winblows"

My company has a similar setup. I have an FC2 web server running Samba shares and have several users mapped to those shares. Our network is all Active Directory.

After the AD switchover, occasionally, users will report the same problem, they cannot see their mapped drives. Going out to the user, and browsing down through the network to re-map the drive will not work. However, direct mapping via the http://IP ADDRESS/Sharename , or //MACHINE/Sharename will work fine.

Then they will drop the connection again sometime in the future, and we get to do it all over again.

Basically, I think it is just "Winblows" not wanting to play with the Linux boxes in AD.

Solution?. - Run an all Linux network... Yeah, we can hope right?

[ScottishCaptain]

Well, here is my Samba config...

[Zigzagcom]

The default workgroup name in the smb.conf is set to MSHOME. In windows the default is WORKGROUP. I assume you have the workgroup name set to MSHOME on the windows boxes, otherwise set the workgroup name to WORKGROUP, or pick one that matches on all machines.
Just checking...

[ScottishCaptain]

Oh wow..
I think I feel stupid now...

Somewhere along the line, it occured to me that I should check in the terminal if smb was running from /etc/init.d/... Well it wasn't.

system-config-services says it wasn't set to be running at any service level.



So I guess the problem here was that the "samba dance"- going into the Config utility and exiting it, probably launched the services to re-read the config file.. Since they weren't running, well, they got launched, and I guess terminated themselfs after a while of doing nothing.

In any case, Samba is still roaring along after around 2 hours of various random usage. The Macs seem perfectly happy to connect to the 'Tux server now, so I guess everything is working.

Thanks for all the help!

Cheers;
SC

[Zigzagcom]

Nice, there usually is a good explanation why things don't work.
Looks like 'Samba' is safe from being poked for now.