Hi,
When are client sessions closed?
Let me explain what I'm trying to do... we're in a School district and
we try to stop kids logging more than once. They way I did this before
was to dump the active sessions from our previous Server2003 fileserver
into a file once a minute and process it with a Perl script to check who
was connected from where, rebooting machines remotely as needed! This
work well enough with the odd 'hung' session causing minor problems.
I'm in exactly the same situation. The school, PDC for ~100 computers,
hundreds of users.
We need to track the logon / logoff. I can't find any usable tools so I
made my own system.
I found that most reliable is the smbstatus output. Windows do strange
thinks with connections during domain logons so use of preexec script is
complicated.
By the Perl script I run smbstatus every 5 seconds, scan the changes
from previous run and write it to the MySQL DB. That's all woks fine.
So now I'm trying to do the same thing with our new Samba (3.0.31)
fileserver using the output from smbstatus. However, in many cases
sessions are still in there long after the user has logged out of the
machine. I'm even seeing two sessions for different people on the same
machine with the same pid number! How is this working? Why are not all
sessions ending when the user logs off? Am I going to be able to use
this for what I'm trying to do?!!
I have some problems with this too. See this thread:
[Samba] smbstatus - switched off computers are sometimes showed
http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2008-September/143701.html
Now I get some new experience with it. The main problem is that samba
sometimes doesn't update the sessionid.tdb file when the process exits.
This records is not showed in smbstatus output, because smbstatus checks
if the PID exists. I patched the smbstatus so it showed me that there is
the records with no related PID. Then, maybe after 1 day or so, this PID
is used for other proccess and I can see the "ghost" logon in my
tracking system (and in most cases logoff at next run - after 5 seconds).
On the list is now the thread "[Samba] processes not closing" where is
described some self-repair function related do sessionid.tdf file. The
samba process when writing to this file should check all records and
delete it if the PID doesn't exist. It will be nice but In my situation
it doesn't work. Maybe it's because of Samba version (3.0.24, official
Debian Etch package).
The most strange think I've seen is that I get some fake logon records
for one user day-by-day at the same time. Let say [EMAIL PROTECTED] - tracked
logon at tuesday 14:10:12, then at the same time at wednesday and
thursday. In fact the COMP1 is switched off or other user is loged on at
the time. The USER1 were loged on the COMP1 at monday.
The fileserver itself is working great, we have over 2000 users happily
using it with less problems than we had on the Windows box. I really
appreciate all the work the Samba team does!
The same experience. Samba-based solution with one PDC is rock-stable
for us in comparsion with several Windows 2003 AD servers running before.
Many thanks,
Steve Rippl
Woodland School District
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