Stock Redhat 6.0 and Samba is not a good mix !!

[John Burton]

Christian E wrote:
> 
> Hi,all
> 
>         Just thought I would share this experiences with you all (so you don't
> have to go through the same trouble as me). I've set up a Samba
> filer-server in my company and from the start I wanted to use the new
> redhat 6. i decided to test the sucker before implementing it by using
> Netbench 6 from ZD. I set up the samba-server and connected 10 klients
> for the test (100 Mbit clients) and started the test....
>         It couldn't even complete 1/4 th of the test before Samba core- dumped
> and in the next couple of test runs all kinds of weird stuff happened:
> "server service not started" on the clients and no response from Samba
> even though it seemed to be running....
>         After having tried both Samba 2.0.4 and 2.0.3 without luck and having
> succesfully run a test with a redhat 5.2 box I decided to try and
> install 5.2 and repeat the test.
>         It worked without any problems whatsoever and with even better
> performance...I don't know if any of you have had such problems, but it
> has confirmed my opinion about Redhat 6.0...It's a rushed release which
> hasn't been tested thoroughly...I also spoke to H.J LU from VA and he
> said that they'd had al sorts of problems with redhat 6....
>         Here's my test result:
> 
> RH ver:         Samba ver:      Kernel:         SMP:    SW-RAID:        Result:
> 
> 6.0             2.0.4           2.2.6           Yes     Yes             Unstable
> 6.0             2.0.3           2.2.6           Yes     Yes             Unstable
> 5.2             2.0.3           2.0.36-0.7      Yes     No              Stable
> 5.2             2.0.3           2.0.36-3        Yes     No              Stable
> 5.2             2.0.3           2.2.6           Yes     No              Stable
> 5.2             2.0.4           2.2.6           Yes     Yes             Stable
> 
>         The last is my current setup...It's stable and performs very well....
> 

Hmmm... Currently running RH 6.0 with SW-Raid, and Samba. Haven't
benched the performance, but it appears to be as responsive as my RH 5.2
combo... One thing I *did* run into was that the kernel shipped with RH
6.0 was 2.2.5 *with* a few patches in the SW-RAID area and that my "md"
partitions created under RH5.2 (kernel 2.2.9) did not play nicely with
the Raidtools and kernel patches in the RH 6.0 kernel. Once I converted
the md partitions to the new style used in RH 6.0, they have been quite
happy and stable. The *standard* kernel distributions (even 2.2.9) do
*not* have the same patches applied to the md code & Raidtools...seems
it was almost a total re-write in some areas. 

I noticed that you are using kernel 2.2.6, which is not the stock RH6.0
kernel... unless you applied the appropriate SW-RAID patches, perhaps
the instability is due to a mismatch between the Raidtools and the
kernel md code ?

John

-- 
John Burton, Ph.D.
Senior Associate                 GATS, Inc.  
j.c.burton at gats-inc.com          11864 Canon Blvd - Suite 101
jcb at visi.net (personal)          Newport News, VA 23606
(757) 873-5920 (voice)           (757) 873-5920 (fax)