[ale] Samba: file corruption on write to share followed by hang

[jhubbslist at att.net (Jeff Hubbs)]

OK, but being ECC RAM, wouldn't something have shown up in 
/var/log/kernel?  How could I tell other than using FSM-style faith?

Jim Kinney wrote:
> Bad ECC RAM is still bad RAM. ECC can only correct a single bit flip 
> in register. 2 bit flips and it's all toast.
>
> It does sound like Samba managed to totally corrupt itself and the 
> hang later may have been related to the system thrashing ram around. 
> The filesystem definitions are kernel space so samba has to access 
> that to function. Just be restarting samba is a pretty good indication 
> that it was memory associated with the samba process. The aggressive 
> caching of the kernel will amplify a bad memory situation. Restarting 
> samba will cause teh samba caching to also restart and that may have 
> overwritten the bad data portion which was related to the filesystem 
> management area.