Fedora 1 Intermittent Pauses

[apostasy1]

I have Fedora Core 1 running on a server with the following specifications:

P3 900MHz
512 MB PC133 SDRAM
2 160GB Seagate drives in RAID-1 on a HPT370 RAID card

The above information probably won't help, but I thought I'd mention it anyways. This machine runs Samba and acts as a file server among a little over 20 users. At random, the server completely locks up for a period of 5 to 15 seconds. Nobody is able to browse Samba shares and all of the workstations running AutoCAD completely hang up. Oddly enough, I can still ping the server when this happens, and the ps -aux command doesn't reveal anything unusual - nor do the log files.

This does not happen to our two other servers, so I've ruled out the possibility that it's a switching problem. The server is receiving its IP address through DHCP (don't ask - I need to change it to static some day). I ordered some replacement memory and a new network card. I'm guessing that it's a hardware-related problem, but I can't say for certain.

Can anyone offer any insight to this problem?

Thanks in advance,

 

[thedaver]

My two responses:

1) I don't know anything about Samba at this level, so please keep your feelers out, maybe this list will help... consider a new thread.
2) Don't be surprised if a disk/cache/RAID issue is being masked as high CPU on SMBd. You may find that the SMB is actually WAITING for disk/cache to finish something, which makes SMB APPEAR to be the culprit.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[apostasy1]

thedaver,

I believe I may have found the problem (Or, at least, I hope I found it).

http://groups-beta.google.com/group...+cpu+user+group&rnum=1&hl=en#e55957e1135caa53

http://groups-beta.google.com/group...+cpu+user+group&rnum=5&hl=en#a80f51978de7005e

Since last year, I've been deleting users no longer employed here by removing their user names from the passwd, passwd-, and smbpasswd files. I have never removed their user names from the group files. Apparently, inconsistency between the files will cause smbd to produce high CPU utilization.

I hope this is it...

 

[thedaver]

OOOOOOOooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

That's icky! Good luck! Didn't realize Samba was subject to such issues.

D.E.R. Management - IT Project Management Consulting

http://www.dermanagement.com/

 

[apostasy1]

I'm presently using the version of Samba that was included with Fedora Core 1, which is 3.0.0. The newest release is 3.0.14, and from what I've read, there are actually *several* bugs that can cause high CPU utilization. They've all been fixed in the latest release, so I may be forced to upgrade to the latest version of Samba. This ought to fun.