Really strange problem with XP & SAMBA

Hi all, just around 2 months ago I setup a micro-network with 2
Windows XP home workstations+NortonAV using a Linux (RedHat 9 + Samba
Version 2.2.7a-security-rollup-fix) as main file server. It ran
flawesly from the first moment but a power failure last week made the
server reboot. After it Windows XP Home can not work properly with the
server. It's possible to read files from samba shares, even large ones
but when writting to the samba shares windows programs take a long
time (minutes) to complete or just completely blocks. I though it was
just a hardware problem after the power failure (voltage peak breaking
the ethernet cards) but the strange thing comes next:
- Both Windows XP home workstations continue to work one another with
no problem, sharing, reading and writing files through the network.
- I can also read/write to the Linux samba server with any other
computer at hand (Win2000, Win98, linux, ...).
- I checked changing the switch and ethernet cards.
- No setup changes have been made to the initial setup and it worked
for 2 months before the power failure!!!
- The samba log just complain client has remotely disconected when
trying to write.

Is it possible to know what is failing to work. ¿Any hint?

Thanks!

Hi,


first of all i would advice you to ask in another news group dedicated to samba:

comp.protocols.smb

You might find more help there.

Regarding your problem i have no solution for you. But any it seems like the
server power-down could have crashed some run-time databases of samba and this
might cause the trouble. All machines that were not logged into samba when
the crash occured might not suffer from this issue, since there have not been
runtime-entries for them when the power failed.
I'm not fimilar with sambs interna's so i can't name any specific file.
Although i think it might be raelted to some file locking.

You should also consider the installation of the last samba release (see
www.samba.org) to gain from some bug fixing.
AFAIK there has been an issue between a newly M$ security update for XP, 2k and
the likes and samba which is addressed only in the latest releases.
If you want to stay with the 2.2.x code base there is also an update
(i think 2.2.9) which you could use.

HTH

Ralf