Messages in this thread | | | Date | Sun, 19 Sep 1999 21:56:03 -0500 | From | Fuzzy Fox <> | Subject | Re: Samba can't keep NT shares mounted |
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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
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