Chapter 35. Reporting Bugs
Prev | Part V. Troubleshooting | Next

## Chapter 35. Reporting Bugs

### John H. Terpstra

Samba Team

`<jht@samba.org>`

### Jelmer R. Vernooij

The Samba Team

`<jelmer@samba.org>`

### Andrew Tridgell

Samba Team

`<tridge@samba.org>`

27 June 1997

## Introduction

Please report bugs using Samba's Bugzilla facilities and take the time to read this file before you submit a bug report. Also, check to see if it has changed between releases, as we may be changing the bug reporting mechanism at some point.

Please do as much as you can yourself to help track down the bug. Samba is maintained by a dedicated group of people who volunteer their time, skills and efforts. We receive far more mail than we can possibly answer, so you have a much higher chance of a response and a fix if you send us a “developer friendly” bug report that lets us fix it fast.

Do not assume that if you post the bug to the comp.protocols.smb newsgroup or the mailing list that we will read it. If you suspect that your problem is not a bug but a configuration problem, it is better to send it to the Samba mailing list, as there are thousands of other users on that list who may be able to help you.

You may also like to look though the recent mailing list archives, which are conveniently accessible on the Samba Web pages at http://samba.org/samba/.

## General Information

Before submitting a bug report, check your config for silly errors. Look in your log files for obvious messages that tell you've misconfigured something. Run testparm to check your config file for correct syntax.

Have you looked through ? This is extremely important.

If you include part of a log file with your bug report, then be sure to annotate it with exactly what you were doing on the client at the time and exactly what the results were.

## Debug Levels

If the bug has anything to do with Samba behaving incorrectly as a server (like refusing to open a file), then the log files will probably be quite useful. Depending on the problem, a log level of between 3 and 10 showing the problem may be appropriate. A higher level gives more detail, but may use too much disk space.

To set the debug level, use the `log level` in your `smb.conf`. You may also find it useful to set the log level higher for just one machine and keep separate logs for each machine. To do this, add the following lines to your main `smb.conf` file:

`log level = 10`
`log file = /usr/local/samba/lib/log.%m`
`include = /usr/local/samba/lib/smb.conf.%m`

and create a file `/usr/local/samba/lib/smb.conf.`machine`` where `machine` is the name of the client you wish to debug. In that file put any `smb.conf` commands you want, for example `log level` may be useful. This also allows you to experiment with different security systems, protocol levels and so on, on just one machine.

The `smb.conf` entry `log level` is synonymous with the parameter `debuglevel` that has been used in older versions of Samba and is being retained for backward compatibility of `smb.conf` files.

As the `log level` value is increased, you will record a significantly greater level of debugging information. For most debugging operations, you may not need a setting higher than `3`. Nearly all bugs can be tracked at a setting of `10`, but be prepared for a large volume of log data.

## Internal Errors

If you get the message “INTERNAL ERROR” in your log files, it means that Samba got an unexpected signal while running. It is probably a segmentation fault and almost certainly means a bug in Samba (unless you have faulty hardware or system software).

If the message came from smbd, it will probably be accompanied by a message that details the last SMB message received by smbd. This information is often useful in tracking down the problem so please include it in your bug report.

You should also detail how to reproduce the problem, if possible. Please make this reasonably detailed.

You may also find that a core file appeared in a `corefiles` subdirectory of the directory where you keep your Samba log files. This file is the most useful tool for tracking down the bug. To use it, you do this:

    $ gdb smbd core

adding appropriate paths to smbd and core so gdb can find them. If you do not have gdb, try `dbx`. Then within the debugger, use the command where to give a stack trace of where the problem occurred. Include this in your report.

If you know any assembly language, do a disass of the routine where the problem occurred (if its in a library routine, then disassemble the routine that called it) and try to work out exactly where the problem is by looking at the surrounding code. Even if you do not know assembly, including this information in the bug report can be useful.

## Attaching to a Running Process

Unfortunately, some UNIXes (in particular some recent Linux kernels) refuse to dump a core file if the task has changed uid (which smbd does often). To debug with this sort of system, you could try to attach to the running process using `gdb smbd `PID`` where you get `PID` from smbstatus. Then use c to continue and try to cause the core dump using the client. The debugger should catch the fault and tell you where it occurred.

## Patches

The best sort of bug report is one that includes a fix! If you send us patches, please use `diff -u` format if your version of diff supports it, otherwise use `diff -c4`. Make sure you do the diff against a clean version of the source and let me know exactly what version you used.

Prev | Up | Next
Chapter 34. Analyzing and Solving Samba Problems | Home | Part VI. Appendixes