Tiger Server – Samba horribly flaky

[Anonymous]

Has anyone here experienced MAJOR issues using Samba with Tiger Server? I just recently installed a new 10.4.3 Server to replace an older 10.3 one that ran without a hitch – now it seems that multiple times daily nmbd dies and the windows clients on my network are not able to access any shares until I shutdown and restart nmbd and smbd on the system – it’s terrible. The logs are no help, no awry entries or any other clues to what might be going on. I found a long discussion on Apple’s boards about the problem, but nobody came up with a satisfactory reason or solution to the problem – wondering if anyone lurking around here might have more insight. Furthermore, does anybody have any clue if compiling the latest version of Samba to replace the Apple compiled/provided one is feasible? At this point I’m not beyond doing that if it means it brings a little more stability back to the fileserver.

[Flash]

Yes, I experienced the same random crashing of the netbios daemon (nmbd) after moving to 10.4.x server. An SE friend of mine at Apple recommended the following and it hasn’t crashed in months.

1. Make sure that DNS is running on your server. Make sure that the server has a dns entry for itself.

Server Admin/Windows/Settings/Advanced:
2. Ideally “Workgroup Master Browser” and “Domain Master Browser” should both be enabled. An aside, this did not interfere with my seperate AD domain on the same network.
3. Enable WINS on your server.
4. Configure WINS on Windows clients to point to server.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply!

Your steps more or less mirrored my setup, except for having the internal DNS running with an entry to itself. However, it seems like the 10.4.4 update has brought some stability with it, even though I don’t think they made any update to Samba in the release. Haven’t had nmbd die on me yet, knock on wood!

[Author]

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