Re: [TCLUG:5368] Samba time-outs

[pani@frontiernet.net]

1. Can you see which process is using it when it says that the
   device is busy ?  You can use something like lsof.  From what
   you say it looks like it must be the "smbd"

2. If you can try replicating the same thing while you access
   the drive from a remote samba machine instead of the explorer
   on Win95. Or try disconnecting the win95 machine from the 
   network and then unmount. 

3. You could try to make smbd start from inetd. There are
   instructions on the man smbd pages on how to do this. This
   should start up smbd only when there is a connection.

4. Use the smbstatus program to see if the connection is still 
   lying around  after you get out of win95.

This might give you some clues as to what is not happening :-).

HTH,
sandipan
--

Neal Tovsen wrote:
> 
> Sorry in advance if this is long-winded, but I'm not sure what could be
> causing this issue and didn't want to leave anything out that might matter.
> 
> I have a Syquest removable disk that I mount to /mnt/syquest. I use it for
> porting stuff from work to home. I've found that if I use Win95 at work to
> format the disk, it creates a (I'm not sure if this is the correct term)
> partition-less disk, meaning that I mount /dev/sda. For NT to format the
> disk, I have to use the disk manager to create a partition before
> formatting, which means that in Linux I mount /dev/sda1.
> 
> My problem is with releasing the filesystem after use. I have this line in
> my /etc/fstab:
> 
> /dev/sda  /mnt/syquest  vfat    noauto,user,uid=502,gid=100
> 
> This allows me to mount the filesystem in such a way that my default Samba
> user (pcguest) has read/write permissions to the disk. Obviously, this
> doesn't work for the disks which need to be mounted from /dev/sda1, so I
> usually just mount this by explicitly specifying all the parameters when I
> use mount.
> 
> Here's my problem: When I mount /dev/sda1 from the command line and access
> the disk via Samba, I can unmount the disk within seconds of leaving the
> /mnt/syquest directory in my Win95 explorer. If I use the fstab entry to
> mount /dev/sda, then access the disk via Samba, then attempt to umount, it
> tells me that the "device is busy", and won't let me umount it for a VERY
> long time. I've never timed it, but it's sometimes at least 10-15 minutes.
> If I re-start Samba, I can unmount it immediately.
> 
> Since restarting Samba is a PITA, what can I do about this? I didn't see
> anything in the smb.conf file to help me.