Server too busy

[Carmen S]

I am relatively new to Linux - my experience is mainly classroom related but I know enough to get myself into trouble. I am running a small network on Redhat Linux 7 something. The pcs on the network run Windows products from 95 to XP. Before I arrived, the server wasn't really used for file sharing even though a lot of file sharing is done. I have been slowly teaching everyone how to store files on the network and the benefit to that however, I have experienced several occasions where one or more pc that could previously connect to the server, suddenly can't and they get an error message about the server being too busy. The network only has 10 pcs and believe me, they don't all access the server at one time and I don't thing that would be too much for the server. This may go on for a computer for a few days - rebooting the pc doesn't help - and then all of a sudden they are able to access the server again.

Does anyone have any ideas on what could cause this and is there any way I can avoid this for the future?

Carmen

[sarumont]

Welcome to the forums!

Can you post some more info please:

1) How are you sharing the files
2) The general network (hardware/infrastructure side) configuration
3) Anything that I can't think of that you think might help

[Carmen S]

I did not set up the network but as far as I know, all file sharing is accomplished through groups. Actually, everyone who is given network access is belongs to the same group. So the server busy error has happened to peopl belonging to this group.

Infrastructure - the network installation is about 2 years old, so relatively new. We have a dell switch, cat 5 cabling. As I said before, the server itself is a pc - p233 with about 700 MG available hd space - I'm not sure how much RAM. The computers on the network range from pentium to pentium 4 with a mixture of 3com and Linksys NICs.

And, not a lot of file sharing is done. The last time we had the 'server busy' problem, someone had scanned a few photos and saved them onto the network so they could be accessible via another pc.

Does that help?

[GoldenEye]

It can be out og space for tmp system working maybe.

Se your /var/log/messages with tail /var/log/messages command to get more info about wat's going on.

Post that info, or some of them, to help us understand.

It will be also good idea if you describe us the network structure, the file sharing system used, the server and clients configuration in use.