At P-IV (2.6gh/512mb/80gb intel 945 chipset) I installed Fedora Core-4 (kernel 2.6.11) in server mode with X and Gnome. In distro there was samba-3.0.14a which installed at once with OS Then I installed samba-swat In system-config-services smb marked for starting when Linux start When OS started I go to system-config-services and see that smbd not run , but nmbd running. And about smbd I read message "smbd dead but pid file exist" "nmbd (pid NNNN) running" And from client (Windows XP home edition) access denied I click restart-button in system-config-services - no effect! In terminal I run command service smb restart or service smb stop service smb start or smbd restart or smbd stop smbd start or put in rc.local these commands and restart OS no effect! Only one way to revive it - through swat (local or over net - no difference) It is bad way because I may be far from server when its power fall down then up I upgraded to samba-3.0.20b Nothing is changed It seems for me this bug like #949 at Jan 2004 What must I do? Where must I lookup ? May be kill pid-files manually, and start smb-service in rc.local? PS. Excuse me for my poor English.
I solved my problem by that method: 1. I turn off autostart samba by chkconfig smb off 2. In /etc/rc.local I added line: echo 'service smb start' | at now+1 minute Comment: It seemed for me, there is not enough time for starting Samba. when I turn off autostart Samba and after reboot I made certain of absense '/var/run/smbd.pid' and '/var/run/nmbd.pid' and '/var/lock/subsys/smb' Then I added line 'service smb start' in rc.local This gave me effect 'smb dead but pid-file exist' when I commented this line in rc.local and first command after reboot I do 'service smb start'. All correct! After many experiments with '/etc/rc.d/init.d/smb' and '/etc/rc.d/functions' I undestanded that they work correctly. And I thought while I login, this time is enough for Samba is ready for correct starting. It was strange, but sleep-command not helped. I thought that Samba start correctly AFTER prompt. So I added this line in rc.local It seems for me it is bug
You don't give enough information to determine if there is a bug or not. try setting 'debug level = 10' in smb.conf and starting Samba. The look for an explanation of why nmbd is not starting in the log file.
Closing. This looks like a distro or configuration issue.