Problems with Samba And Netatalk

[Robert Watson]

On Wed, 13 Sep 2006, Martin Dames wrote:

> I have changed my system to a SMP system ( 2x P3 1Ghz, Coppermine ). I 
> activated the SMP function in the kernel conf and compiled the latest 
> FreeBSD 6.1 Kernel... so the system runs very very well... I do had an 
> uptime up to 7 days.... but... here is the problem:
>
> Either samba or netatalk cannot handle files with 4.36 GB correctly 
> anymore... so I rip some DVDs to an image file under windows and store this 
> on my server using samba... this works well...
>
> I burn the DVDs with Toast under Mac OS X with either Samba or netatalk... 
> If I am doing full speed writing 4x to a DVD FreeBSD is crashing 
> everytime... ok, sometimes it works but after the third DVD it crashes in 
> any case... I need to reboot the whole FreeBSD system...
>
> Before the switch to a SMP system the whole procedure worked very well... so 
> it must cohere with SMP. But I dont know what could it be...
>
> afpd is not logging anything but Samba... unfortunately I have to kill a 
> blank DVD to post the logs here...
>
> until I do that... has anybody an idea what it can be.... maybe I need a 
> special setting in the kernel conf to do samba and netatalk correctly... 
> ahh... and I reinstalled netatalk from the ports... nothing changed...
>
> Thank you very much!

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this -- I've been on travel, and 
don't often check the smp@ mailing list for posts.  You may want to take this 
to the stable@ mailing list, which is frequented by quite a few people willing 
to lend a hand debugging.

It sounds like there there are a lot of variables in flight here.  Would it be 
possible for you to see if you can reproduce the problem with just one of 
netatalk and samba in use?  Also, could you try upgrading to the latest 
6-STABLE, and compiling your kernel with INVARIANTS, WITNESS, KDB, and DDB? 
There's a section in the developer's handbook on setting up for debugging. 
With these debugging tools in place, it will be a lot easier to track down 
this problem.  Finally, if we do end up doing much kernel debugging, you will 
want to use a serial console so that you can copy/paste the debug output on a 
second machine rather than copying it by hand (firewire console also works for 
this).

Thanks,

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge