Since we moved our data from the NFS server to the Samba server
locally, the freezes have been less. We also get a new message in
dmesg which I believe could be related to NFS as well?
lease broken - owner pid = 13673

After reading, I assume this means kernel oplocks aren't working? Could
this have been our problem while we were resharing NFS as well? The
way I understand kernel oplocks, they allow the linux kernel to be
aware of samba oplocks for non-samba processes. So, can we disable
kernel oplocking and run rsync etc.. while users are working? In which
case, is there even a point in having them if the server is strictly
used for servering window's clients?
kernel: 2.6.9-22 & samba 3.0.21B

Thank you, Ryan