verify CIFS/SMB protocol negotiation?

[Steve Huff]

Hello folks!

I'm monitoring several Samba servers (SuSE OES) that suffer from a  
debilitating problem: periodically their authentication cache stops  
working, and as a result none of the services that depend on that  
authentication cache, including Samba, respond to requests.

I'm currently using the check_disk_smb plugin to verify that a test  
user can establish a CIFS connection (and also to monitor disk usage,  
but that's secondary).  Unfortunately, when the abovementioned  
problem occurs, check_disk_smb fails not CRITICAL, but UNKNOWN; this  
is because the request times out instead of being rejected, since the  
server is still listening on the port, but the SMB negotiation never  
completes.

I thought I would try to add an additional layer of testing by using  
check_tcp's ability to send a string and expect a string in return;  
unfortunately, it looks like SMB doesn't talk using human-readable  
strings (or at least it looked that way to me).  check_tcp always  
succeeds, even when check_disk_smb will time out and fail.

Anybody else run into a similar problem?  Any suggestions for another  
way to implement the extra later of testing, or any other ideas?

thanks,
-Steve

-- 
Steve Huff - Systems Administrator, Harvard-MIT Data Center -  
shuff at hmdc.harvard.edu




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