[Samba] Samba Serving NFS Mounted Directories

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Fri, Jan 22, 2010 at 04:49:33PM -0800, Jon Forrest wrote:
> I have a Sun 7310 storage server. This is
> running Solaris 10 but it's self-contained
> and I can't login to it or run Samba on it.
> I manage it with a web interface.
> 
> I have a CentOS 5.3 machine that mounts
> a bunch of file systems via NFS from the
> Sun server. This works fine. I installed
> Samba 3.4.5 on the CentOS machine and
> configured it to share some of the directories
> that are actually NFS mounts from the Sun
> server. I'm able to map these directories
> from both Windows XP and Windows 7.
> 
> I'm seeing several problems:
> 
> 1) Accessing the mapped directories from
> Windows when running Microsoft Office apps is
> extremely slow. I don't have any exact numbers
> but let's say the speed is unusable. Ironically,
> other programs, such as 'vim' and 'notepad'
> don't have this speed problem when accessing
> the same shares.
> 
> 2) Again, using Microsoft Office apps, Windows XP
> machines see files as read-only. Windows 7 works
> fine on the same files.
> 
> The Sun has a non-Samba CIFS implementation
> but it's non-intuitive to set up so I haven't
> tried it. I'm wondering if what I describe
> should work.
> 
> Here's the smb.conf configuration for the share:
> 
> [bgroup]
> 
>      valid users = bgroup
>      path = /home/bgroup
>      public = no
>      writeable = yes
>      browseable = no
>      create mask = 012
>      create mode = 0660
>      directory mode = 0770
> 
> Any comments or suggestions?
> 
> Cordially,

First of all, you really don't want to re-export NFS mounts via Samba.

Secondly, if you absolutely must do it, I recommend the following
settings:

[global]
        # your other options here...
        oplocks = No
        level2 oplocks = No

On certain shares, you may want to set:

        posix locking = No

Ray