[Samba] Is there a maximum number of shares samba can serve?

[Eric Boehm]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 10:56:47AM -0400, Charles Marcus wrote:
>>>>> "Charles" == Charles Marcus <CMarcus at media-brokers.com> writes:

    Charles> On 3/13/2008, Eric Boehm (boehm at nortel.com) wrote:
    >> If I have 50 clients with one connection (one share) now,
    >> that's 50 connections.
    >> 
    >> This could increase to 300*50 connections. Granted, not every
    >> client will be active on every share at the same time but I
    >> could easily see that I could go from 1 to 10 connections per
    >> client.
    >> 
    >> I am interested in knowing or at least estimating how Samba
    >> might perform under these conditions.

    Charles> It might be better if you define the problem and/or goal
    Charles> first...

    Charles> *Why* dod you need 300+ shares? Maybe there's a better
    Charles> way to do it? For example, you could define one (or a
    Charles> few) shares, then using a combination of permissions and
    Charles> the 'hide unreadable' setting, users will only see the
    Charles> folders that they have access rights to...

We currently use Samba as an Interop environment for IBM/Rational
ClearCase.

The desire is control access to each ClearCase VOB individually. There are
anywhere from 100-400 VOBs on each server. Normal UNIX permissions of
owner, group and world are insufficient. In addition, there is a need
to restrict access by hostname as well as user.

I don't think permissions and hide unreadable will help with access by
hostname.

We have a concurrent problem with restricting NFS access relating to
how large the export file can be and how many NFS mounts a client can
make. It is likely that we will have to back off to the level of
filesystems or higher in the directory tree.

For example, we have

/export/vobstore/disk1/proj1/VOBa
/export/vobstore/disk1/proj1/VOBb
/export/vobstore/disk1/proj2/VOBc
/export/vobstore/disk1/proj1/VOBd
/export/vobstore/disk2/proj2/VOBe
/export/vobstore/disk2/proj1/VOBf
/export/vobstore/disk3/proj2/VOBg
/export/vobstore/disk3/proj1/VOBh

The current method is to define the share

[export]
        path = /export

One proposal is to use

[VOBa]
        path = /export/vobstore/disk1/proj1/VOBa
[VOBb]
        path = /export/vobstore/disk1/proj1/VOBb

etc.

This is not going to work for NFS so we may back off to

[disk1]
        path = /export/vobstore/disk1
[disk2]
        path = /export/vobstore/disk2

etc.

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