lkml.org 
[lkml]   [1999]   [Sep]   [19]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: Samba can't keep NT shares mounted
Matthew Vanecek <mev0003@unt.edu> wrote:
>
> On a more constructive note, what in NT/samba combination would cause
> the connection to drop, if everything is working normally?

Even SAMBA has a parameter called "dead time." This is the time that a
connection that is idle will be considered "dead," and the connection
quietly dropped by the server. That means that, if there is no activity
after a certain amount of time, a SAMBA server configured this way will
exhibit the same behavior that NT does, i.e. dropping the connection
after a period of inactivity.

This seems to be an occurrence that all of the various OS's (Win9x, NT,
SAMBA) understand very well: If they find that their connection has
been dropped, the next time they try to use it, they will simply
re-establish the connection, and proceed. However, this requires the
password information to be re-exchanged, and this is the key to SMBFS's
failure.

The MS OS's have their own particular ways of maintaining password
caches, and so re-establishing these connections is just a matter of
course. For SMBFS, this is not so simple, since we desire to have good
separation between kernel and user space tools, something Microsoft can
only wish that they had...

From what I've seen posted on this problem before, it really does seem
to be a breakdown in the kernel-user interface between the smbmount
utility and the kernel itself.

When the kernel goes to access an SMB share, and finds that the
connection has died, it sends a signal to the smbmount process, which
should be waiting around for exactly such a signal. When it catches it,
the smbmount utility is supposed to re-establish the connection, and
then pass that new connection info back to the kernel so that the
operation can be retried.

When people have reported this problem before, the answer returned by
the developers seems to be "Well, we don't see that here. We can't
reproduce the problem. Why don't you attach a debugger to your smbmount
process, and when the problem happens, try to examine some variables and
maybe give us a clue what might be going wrong?"

And the answer from the community seems to be a collective "HUH??" and
so, nothing happens that might fix the problem.

Anyway, that's the way I see it.

--
fox@dallas.net (Fuzzy Fox) || "Just about every computer on the market
sometimes known as David DeSimone || today runs Unix, except the Mac (and
http://www.dallas.net/~fox/ || nobody cares about it). -- Bill Joy '85

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 13:54    [W:0.118 / U:0.188 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site