We had an old ("old" meaning installed a year ago) installation of Fedora v3 running a CMS that was publishing data to Windows Server 2003 over Samba. Occasionally, at the same time in the middle of the night that the publishing occurred, Windows Automatic Updates would download some patch for Windows and reboot the server. Obviously that was a mistake on our part to let these two actions coincide. But the bigger problem was that the Samba link didn't just drop when Windows rebooted. Instead, it locked up. So by the afternoon the next day, people are pulling their hair out trying to figure out what the @#% is wrong with this stupid CMS server, and why it just starts working again when we reboot Linux. We finally narrowed it down to a Windows server reboot--a Samba failure to drop the link.

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/servers/98115-samba-mount-does-not-drop-timeout.html

What should happen is a timeout should occur, an error should be raised to the calling application (the CMS service), the service should halt, and then when the Windows server comes back up and the CMS service on Linux reattempts to access the path, Samba should reattempt to build the link and either succeed or fail.

That was Fedora v3. Now were' using RHEL 5, and meanwhile I'm using Ubuntu 7.04 at home on my laptop. I'm expecting a much smoother Samba experience now. But unfortunately, we cannot even seem to get our Samba links to even work, much less behave correctly (i.e. drop) when the Windows server goes down. Now I'm having all kinds of different issues.

The first issue is on my laptop at home, when I use the Network browser in Nautilus to browse my shared folders on my home machines, everything goes erratic. It sees everything really fast one minute, then it locks up for five minutes the next. I click on a folder, it becomes a file. I hit refresh, it can't "see" anything. I go up the tree a couple branches, it finally starts seeing things. I go back into the branch I was in, and it displays it pretty quickly. I copy a folder to the clipboard, and paste to /home/jon, and nothing happens.

Now it could very well be a Nautilus issue, but then here's the other problem ...

At the office, we now have RHEL 5, we have been trying to migrate off the old Fedora 3 system and onto the new system. And now this happens:

http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/servers/102298-samba-cifs-mount-point-wont-allow-read-write-non-root-user.html

Essentially, once the Linux user writes to the Samba share, the share becomes "owned" by root and the user can't do diddly squat. This essentially breaks our publishing plans, rendering the Samba link useless.

Fortunately, Microsoft was kind enough to implement NFS support in Windows Server 2003 R2, and R2 is the build we just erected for the new environment. I'll try that next. But it still makes me wonder, what on earth happened to Samba?? It's only been around for, like, a decade!