f2n samba with windows7

[mihaly.reg@…]

Created a net drive on windows 7 to samba of f2n 2.3.7.0 with command net use drive: \\server.ip.address\Disc-A1\torrent, it works. Started playback of a movie on win media player and put it on pause. Rebooted fonera from ssh, the windows drive disconnected. Until this point is ok. But when trying to playback again the movie it does not works. Disconneted the drive with net use d: /delete, tried to reconnect with net use.... and it does not connect ! Error message is network resource unavailable....or something like that. Rebooted again fonera and the same net use command now works ! It looks samba does not like a fonera reboot while somebody is connected to it.

[matthijs]

This sounds a bit like a Windows bug to me, but I'll have a go at reproducing it here.

In the meanwhile:

• Does this happen every time, only sometimes or just once?
• Does this happen only when you actually have a file open, or also when you just connect the network drive and then reboot the Fonera?

[matthijs]

I've been able to reproduce this issue once, using the instructions you supplied (but I mounted Disc-A2 directly instead of Disc-A1/torrent as you say). I found that the problem didn't occur when just mounting and unmounting the share, but I actually had to have a movie playing (didn't test any other kind of open file). When doing an tcpdump while the connection was broken, I found the Fonera sent TCP RST packets in response to the initial SYN packets sent by the Windows machine (even though the SYN packets looked identical to the packets in the working case). Perhaps the Windows machine is badgering the Fonera with (reconnect?) packets during startup that cause Samba to go haywire?

Restarting just the samba daemons seemed to help somewhat (I tried this once and the connection got a bit further).

A second attempt, with a second Fonera in between to do full packet dumping for debugging didn't show the problem. I just realized my dump setup was faulty (it wouldn't have dumped anything even if the problem occured).

There was a chance in network topology, though, so either:

1. The problem only occurs occasionally and I was "lucky" the first time.
2. The problem doesn't occur when connecting to the file share through the Fonera's WAN port (only through LAN).

I suspect the second one is more likely, but perhaps you could answer my questions in the previous comment to help out?

In any case, I'll try to do some more debugging next week (installing wireshark on the Windows machine to do the dumping right there) and see if I can get to the bottom of this issue.

[mihaly.reg@…]

<Does this happen every time, only sometimes or just once?> Actually it happened for me 2 times, once when I found it and once next I reproduced it again. Since then I did not rebooted fonera with a movie on pause.

<Does this happen only when you actually have a file open, or also when you just connect the network drive and then reboot the Fonera?> I think (not sure) only when a file is open, ocasionally I reboot fonera and the network drive on win7 works fine after. However I'm not sure 100%, I reboot fonera in rare cases and that win7 machine is maybe powered off (it's only used as media player on a tv set)....so... I should retest...if you don't find the bug in other way.

[matthijs]

Thanks for the extra details! I'll give this some more tries next week, if I need anything else, I'll let you know.

[matthijs]

I just spent some more time trying to reproduce this again, it worked as expected on every attempt. I've been testing connected to a LAN, with and without authentication enabled.

I'm thinking that perhaps this issue was fixed in a Windows Update?

I'm closing this ticket. If the issue still occurs for anyone, feel free to leave another comment and we can try to find out what the magic conditions are to trigger this problem :-)