WinPE clients re-imaging the same machine hit "System error 53 -
network path not found" on the second attempt. systemctl restart smbd
did not help; only a full server power cycle cleared the state.
Root cause is kernel nf_conntrack: the default TCP ESTABLISHED timeout
is 5 days (432000s), so a session from the first WinPE run whose
client rebooted abnormally leaves an ASSURED ESTABLISHED entry that
ufw's state-tracking rules then mis-classify the new SYN against.
Fix applied in three layers:
- /etc/sysctl.d/99-pxe-conntrack.conf drops TCP ESTABLISHED timeout
to 1 hour and shortens the half-closed states to 30s each.
- smb.conf gains socket options TCP_NODELAY SO_KEEPALIVE IPTOS_LOWDELAY
plus keepalive = 30 and deadtime = 5. Active sessions refresh the
conntrack timer every 30s via keepalives so they never age out;
dead ones expire in an hour.
- /usr/local/sbin/smb-diag.sh snapshots kernel + Samba state for
remote diagnosis; /usr/local/sbin/smb-soft-reset.sh walks a
progressive recovery (nmbd/smbd restart, conntrack flush, arp
flush, ss -K) as an alternative to power-cycling.
conntrack package added to download-packages.sh and playbook verify
list so the offline .deb bundle ships with it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
