Runaway smbd processes
 

For some reason my Mac is being overrun with runaway smbd processes. Every so often a new one appears, until well over 100 are running. Each one consumes 0.6-0.7% of my CPU, and eventually both processors are maxxed out and the whole system crawls almost to a halt, and I am forced to reboot.

I have already set the "max smbd processes" to 10, and "deadtime" to 15. But that does not seem to help.

Here are some additional details that have come up:

My computer has been online this morning for about 2 hours, and already there are 85 smbd processes. If I use the xSMB application (from http://www.xeir.com/) to view active SMB connections, I get a list of about 80 "Active Samba Shares", in this form:

***
init_iconv: Conversion from UTF-16LE to CP0 not supported
init_iconv: Attempting to replace with conversion from UTF-16LE to ASCII
init_iconv: Conversion from UTF-8 to CP0 not supported
init_iconv: Attempting to replace with conversion from ASCII to ASCII
init_iconv: Conversion from US-ASCII to CP0 not supported
init_iconv: Attempting to replace with conversion from ASCII to ASCII
init_iconv: Conversion from CP0 to UTF-16LE not supported
init_iconv: Attempting to replace with conversion from ASCII to UTF-16LE
init_iconv: Conversion from CP0 to UTF-8 not supported
init_iconv: Attempting to replace with conversion from ASCII to ASCII
init_iconv: Conversion from CP0 to US-ASCII not supported
init_iconv: Attempting to replace with conversion from ASCII to ASCII
***
...and so forth.

It appears that these are spawned whenever Windows users attempt (unsuccessfully) to connect to my server. I have no idea why this started happening all of a sudden in the past week or so.

Until recently I was successfully sharing folders with Windows users on the network. Now no one is able to connect to my computer, even though its NetBIOS name shows up in the Windows network browser. OS X users are still able to connect through afp, but not through smb.

Does anyone know what could be causing this, or how to fix it? Thanks for any guidance or suggestions.

You failed to mention with version of OS X your running on your server.

I am running 10.4.5, the regular version, not OS X Server.

May be linked to setting a printer server in /etc/cups/client.conf
 

An incaccesible printer server in /etc/cups/client.conf seemed to
have caused the same problem on my computer. So I will now
refrain from using the "ServerName" functionality in /etc/cups/client.conf.

Greetings,
-- reg

Possible fix for runaway smbd processes
 

In my search for an answer (the problem only appeared after 10.4.7 was installed), I found that the -F parameter to smbd may be the fix.

Read this:

http://www.macwindows.com/OSXServer.html#608

in particular the "solution by Houhaud.

Let me know if it helps.

Steve

Update
 

Somehow I lost track of this thread, so failed to post any follow-up. Some days after my previous posts, after trying all manner of fixes and troubleshooting, I finally just reinstalled OS X. This fixed the problem for me. Thanks everyone for your comments.