[Samba] Probably a stupid question about smbfs and smb.conf.

[Kris Kelley]

This seems like it should have an obvious answer, but I haven't seen a
clear word one way or the other in the man pages or other documentation
that I have read - is smbmount's behavior in any way governed by the
smb.conf file?

The reason I ask is one of the other sysadmins here has been trying to
figure out ways to improve smbfs performance, and he came across the
speed.txt file in Samba's documentation.  However, this file seems
geared towards Samba being used as a server, which we do not do (we only
use smbmount to mount Windows network shares as smbfs).  I wondered if
any of the advice in that file might still apply to a Linux smbfs
client, and that got me wondering if even anything at all in smb.conf
applies to smbmount.

As a test, I tried mounting a Windows network share on linux
workstation, after removing smb.conf.  smbmount complained about the
missing configuration file, but the share was still successfully
mounted.

So, really I have two questions.  1, does smbmount require smb.conf?  2,
are there ways to tweak performance of an smbfs client, and if so, is
there related documentation?

Thank you for your time.

---Kris Kelley