I worked with a gentleman this afternoon on a samba problem that
I wanted to let everyone know about JIC you run into it.

The symptoms were that when either smbd or testparm were
ran, they would appear to hang up early on.  A closer look
using testparm showed that it would display the path for
the smb.conf file it was attempting to use, then it would "appear"
to go into a loop.  The process continued to chew up CPU time,
but nothing else was displayed back to the user.  I suspected
some form of permissions problem, (and one was found) but
even after deleting and replacing the file, the same symptoms
persisted.  Eventually (lots of miscellaneous things in between
snipped), I had him create a new smb.conf file from scratch using
vi.  Things now started working correctly.
  I still think that the file permissions came into play here since the
information in the newly created file was a subset of the prior information
(the stuff omitted "shouldn't" have had a bearing on it beginning
to work).  The only other thing was that he had been maintaining
the file on his PC (notepad I believe) and transferring it to the
3000 (I didn't ask how, ftp, WRQ, etc.).  It is possible that something
in the file was causing a problem, but testparm didn't seem to read
even the first line.  I've since edited my smb.conf file using notepad
to insert some information at the top of the file, but it didn't seem to
cause testparm, nmbd, or smbd any problems.  If I come up with THE
definitive answer, I'll let everyone know.
  So, if things appear to "hang" on you, try creating a new smb.conf file
from scratch and see if that gets you to the next step!

Regards,
Michael L Gueterman
Easy Does It Technologies
email: [log in to unmask]
http://www.editcorp.com
voice: (509) 943-5108
fax:   (509) 946-1170