[herbsman]

Bit of an odd one here.

I setup a cheap PC with Ubuntu running 10.10 x64 and I installed samba on it. I have setup all the user accounts with shares and this part is working fine. All clients connecting to the server are running MBPs on Snow Leopard.

The weird thing is that for some users, when they connect, later disconnect, and try to reconnect again, they get a 'Connection failed' error message from the Finder. I know it's not the user account because when this happens, I can try a test connection attempt on my own mac or a test mac and it works fine! The only way these users can re-establish a connection to the server is to reboot their macs entirely which causes severe workflow disruptions as you can imagine.

Has anyone ever seen this before? It's baffling to me and I can't figure it out. Are there any commands I can run in a terminal to 'purge' anything cached from their previous samba connections? I don't know samba well enough to think of what could be causing this.

If there are any good tricks or tips you can pass down, I would really appreciate it!

[besson3c]

What are your logs showing you?

[herbsman]

Hi Besson thanks for the quick response. I'm a bit of a noob so please point me in the right direction if I am complete going off course. Not sure if you meant the log files from mac or the server, or which exact one! I presume you mean the samba log files?

On the mac:
/var/log/samba

It is empty


On the ubuntu box: /var/log/samba

I see a bunch of logs in there, and I found computer name's log file so here are the last couple of lines. All of it is mainly the printcap stuff, with a samba reference at the very end.

-----
[2011/02/07 17:35:29.530058, 0] printing/pcap.c:178(pcap_cache_reload)
Unable to open printcap file /etc/printcap for read!
[2011/02/07 17:35:29.531019, 0] printing/pcap.c:178(pcap_cache_reload)
Unable to open printcap file /etc/printcap for read!
[2011/02/07 17:35:30.201678, 1] smbd/service.c:1251(close_cnum)
sue-mbp (::ffff:192.168.10.172) closed connection to service ub-server1share
admin2@ub-server1:/var/log/samba$
-----

[besson3c]

I meant the Ubuntu machine's logs... When you have been disconnected and you can't reconnect, can you establish a connection using the smbclient and/or smbmount CLI tool? We need some sort of error message to trace. Another worthwhile test would be to see if you can establish Samba mounts via another user account on the same machine. Are you sure the unmount of the share was recorded? Are you seeing this share in /Volumes at the same time you are unable to reconnect?

[besson3c]

Info on smbmount and smbclient:

SMB HOWTO: Accessing an SMB Share With Linux Machines

[herbsman]

Originally Posted by besson3c 

I meant the Ubuntu machine's logs... When you have been disconnected and you can't reconnect, can you establish a connection using the smbclient and/or smbmount CLI tool? We need some sort of error message to trace. Another worthwhile test would be to see if you can establish Samba mounts via another user account on the same machine. Are you sure the unmount of the share was recorded? Are you seeing this share in /Volumes at the same time you are unable to reconnect?

In the Finder there is no indication that it is connected, but I never thought about checking /Volumes so I'm not sure. If this happens again I will definitely check and will try the separate user test as well. I need to catch up on the samba commands so thanks for the link I will be reading up on that.

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by herbsman 

In the Finder there is no indication that it is connected, but I never thought about checking /Volumes so I'm not sure. If this happens again I will definitely check and will try the separate user test as well. I need to catch up on the samba commands so thanks for the link I will be reading up on that.

Good luck! Command line interfaces are generally better about spitting out error messages to the console that we can Google. Trying to guess at why a GUI is silently failing is definitely no fun! Besides, there is probably no magic in the Finder UI and what it does behind the scenes in connecting to Samba shares that would be any different from using the command line tools.