Every so often the subsidiary Samba daemons on my FreeBSD box dump core. This isn’t a problem because the main smbd daemon will respawn another. However, the core file itself would fill up my root volume causing some other programs not to work properly. It turns out the fix was relatively easy. I added the line:

ulimit -c 0

At the beginning of the startup file /usr/local/etc/rc.d/samba.sh to prevent the generation of core files. As to why smbd is failing — that’s an investigation for another day.