LinuxCIFS troubleshooting

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Revision as of 12:47, 16 October 2009 by Jlayton (talk | contribs)

Asking for Help

The best place to ask for help with Linux CIFS is on the linux-cifs-client mailing list. When asking for help, it's best to provide some basic info:

  • The kernel version you're using (the output of uname -r)
  • The mount.cifs version you're using (mount.cifs -V)
  • A clear, concise description of the problem
  • A description of the CIFS server with which you're having trouble (Windows version if it's windows, samba version if it's samba, name of the appliance if it's something else)
  • if you're able to mount the host, get the contents of /proc/fs/cifs/DebugData

Enabling Debugging

The CIFS code contains a number of debugging statements that can be enabled. If you ask for help on the list, one of the developers may ask you for this info. You can also turn it on on your own, but it's not generally helpful unless you're willing to dig into the code.

To enable debugging, echo a non-zero value into /proc/fs/cifs/cifsFYI. For example:

# modprobe cifs
# echo 7 > /proc/fs/cifs/cifsFYI

To disable it:

# echo 0 > /proc/fs/cifs/cifsFYI

These messages end up in the kernel ring buffer. You can view them using dmesg.

# dmesg

syslog will generally also pick up much of it, but if the rate of messages is rather large, syslog tends to drop it. Getting the info straight out of the ring buffer is generally preferred since that's lossless.

This debugging however can be rather chatty and have a significant impact on performance. It's often best to use this with easily reproducible problems. That is:

  • turn on debugging
  • reproduce the issue
  • turn off debugging

Wire Captures

It's often helpful sometimes to capture