[Samba] Friendly Reminder: Would you please comment on my findings?

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Fri, 2017-08-18 at 20:40 +0200, awl1 via samba wrote:
> 
> Otherwise, please advise whether an individual donation to the Samba 
> project might be helpful...

We do greatly appreciate donations from Samba users, but they really
are donation, they are not a proxy for the purchase of developer time. 

We keep that quite separate, it avoids stepping on the toes of the
commercial companies who pay for many of our salaries.  Indeed, we
don't normally know the individual names of our donors but we do
appreciate them in total, as it helps fun travel expenses.

I do realise you are in between a rock and a hard place.  You have
identified an interesting issue, triggered by a massive protocol change
(so not able to be bisected down to a regression) that requires
significant work to understand and may or not be possible to resolve. 

Have you tried to engage with Thecus on this?  I know it seems odd, and
getting to speak with an engineer who actually understands what you are
trying to warn them might be very difficult, but they will be upgrading
at some point and then it is a regression to them, and they may have
the incentive to look into it.  It seems like a long shot, but similar
long shots include getting the attention of another NAS Vendor already
using Samba 4.x, like NETGEAR, or as an enterprise linux customer?

Does this just happen on your NAS, or can you reproduce on stock Samba
locally on a PC?  Are you sure it always happened with SMB2?  If you
can find any SMB2-supporting release (early support was in 3.5 I think,
and 3.6 had it off by default) that is not slow then bisect your way
between that and master, it might undercover a regression (for example,
due to our symlinks security fix).

I hope this helps,

Andrew Bartlett
-- 
Andrew Bartlett                       http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team  http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Catalyst IT          http://catalyst.net.nz/services/samba