[Samba] Speed of Samba through VPN

[James Cooke]

Hi there,

Recently, I successfully set up an RHEL3 server running Samba over a 
PPTP VPN connection, however, the client is complaining about access 
speeds. The problem is not so much opening the files, but browsing the 
folders - however, this only appears to be slow from the client end, not 
mine.

Today, we ran a quick test which compared the volume of traffic sent 
over the VPN connections to the central server from a client machine and 
from my test machine. We found that the volume of data being sent and 
received during the process of opening a shared folder, seeing the 
contents appear, then opening a subfolder and seeing its contents appear 
was approximately three times as much on the client machine as my test 
one. Does anyone know why it should be the case that smb is sending and 
receiving three times as much data to one machine using a share as another?

The test machines are both running Win2K SP4, have exactly the same VPN 
connection settings and offline file settings (turned off for this 
resource). The machines are at different locations using different 
connection technologies to reach the internet - could this be effecting 
the volume of traffic sent and received by smb?

I have followed some of the discussion regarding the use of Samba 
through a VPN connection and from the posts earlier this month, I can 
see that Apache and Davenport look like better long term solutions, 
however, we won't be able to implement these until the new year - so 
help on a short term solution would be really appreciated.

All the best,

James