[Samba] Samba over PVFS: Corrupted Data

[Justin Mazzola Paluska]

Hello,

I'm trying to export Samba shares that access a PVFS2
(http://www.pvfs.org/pvfs2)-mounted partition.  PVFS2 is a parallel,
distributed file system for Linux clusters.  PVFS2 gets mounted like
any other partition and it offers non-POSIX file semantics similar to
NFS.  We can use standard shell commands (mv, ls, cp, etc.) to read
and write files on the PVFS2 file system without any problems.  On
Samba (3.0.13) we've had quite a few problems:

1.  When we first made a Samba share, Windows (XP) explorer could see
    files, but would not let us manipulate them.  For example, if we
    tried copying a file on the share, Windows would complain about a
    bad file handle.  

    The Samba logs indicated that send_file_readX was causing a
    problem, so we put "use sendfile = no" in the share's
    configuration.  We can now read from the share and save files
    using Notepad.

2.  However, if we try copying files to the share with explorer or
    cmd, such as a pdf file, they get corrupted.  The files are
    consistently corrupted in the same way.

    Similarly, Word refuses to write to the share.  Unfortunately, for
    these problems, the samba logs say nothing -- I just see that the
    Windows computer connected to Samba server and the logs stop
    there.

Has anyone had luck sharing PVFS volumes, or if not, are there any
special settings I need for file systems with NFS-like semantics?

I'm using a 2.6.14 Linux kernel on Mandrake 10.2.  Samba is the
aforementioned version 3.0.13.  

Thanks,
	--Justin