Locking problems with Solaris 2.6 and NFS

[David Collier-Brown]

Julien Boppert <boppert at hdz-ima.rwth-aachen.de> wrote:
> we have an Enterprise 450 with Solaris 2.6 and mounted NFS-shares from
> an Sparc 20 (Solaris 2.6 too). On the Enterprise we run Samba 2.0.5a as
> PDC and export the mounted Shares with Samba to our WIN NT 4.0
> Servicepack 3 Clients.

	Erk!  It's generally a bad idea to import data
	via NFS and re-export it via Samba: the data has to make
	two trips across the net, which doubles the latency and
	the load on the net.

	I recommend running an smb server on each machine where
	the disks are. Sometimes you just can't, and so Samba
	doesn't prohibit re-exporting[1], but it's a bad idea.

> I think the locking from the NFS will not work with Samba locking. Can
> it be true ?

	Fairly likely: Samba depends on the system's underlying
	locking working, and NFS locking is unimpressive[2].

--dave
[1. NFS explicitly prevents you from doing this.
 2. Locking breaks the NFS design principle that the
    server is stateless. This make it both hard and
    politically incorrect (;-)) ]
-- 
David Collier-Brown,  | Always do right. This will gratify some people
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