Broken Samba pipes

[Ian Foster]

Since our NT PDCs (which our Samba servers use for user authentication)were rebooted for virus patching last week, errors of the following type have been generated in our systems logs on our HP live/test systems :
smbd[7522]:write_socket_data: write failure. Error = Broken pipe
I have found that restarting Samba on the test system has stopped the problem, but restarting Samba on our live system means an outage for our 7x24x365 call centre.
Has anybody come across this before ? Is there a workaround short of restarting Samba ? Also are these errors likely to cause a problem until we can schedule an outage ? There does not appear to be any adverse effect on the system or end users at present.

Any advice gratefully recieved !

[Steven E. Protter]

Ian,

restarting samba is hardly a disrutive fix.

It inconveniences users for only a few seconds.

It makes sense that if authentication is going through windows PDC, that there would be problems with existing sessions when the PDC gets booted.

The error can be prevented by terminating user samba sessions right after the PDC boot. This would let you skip restarting samba. Restarting samba is less complex though.

SEP