W2K-Terminal Server vs Samba 2.0.7

Charles N. Owens owensc at enc.edu
Wed Dec 20 14:13:26 GMT 2000


acherry at pobox.com wrote:

> We never actually ran into an open file limit with our WTS 4.0 system
> and Samba.  The problem we ran into was with file locking.  Having
> multiple users on one smbd process was particularly disastrous for
> multiuser Access databases.  At least on Solaris, Samba uses fcntl()
> record locking for byte-range locks.  The big problem is that fcntl()
> locks are meant to prevent one process from modifying data that
> another process has locked -- they aren't meant to be used within the
> context of the *same* process.
> [...]

> Switching the WTS clients to disallow multiple users per connection
> gets around this problem, since you end up with separate smbd
> processes for each user.
>
> If Win2K doesn't allow turning this "feature" off, the only
> alternatives I could see are to either rewrite Samba's locking
> mechanisms to be entirely internal (using UID/PID or UID/client
> pairs), or to have a single de-multiplexer process that routes data to
> separate smbd processes.  Either solution would make the code more
> complex and would be likely to slow things down.  And the first
> approach still doesn't address the problem of limits to file
> descriptors for UNIX processes, which may or may not be tunable
> depending on the OS.

(sigh) I've wondered about Samba's locking implementation... looks like in this case some rethinking
is required.

This suggests that perhaps, at this moment, NFS-based file access may be more viable (still using a
Samba PDC, of course).  Any thoughts on this?

With a Windows NFS client there is then the question of how it accomplishes Windows SID to Unix
UID/GID mapping.  Something seamless would be nice, of course.  :-)  Any recommendations?  Has
anyone tried Microsoft's SFU?

Of course... I'd rather just use Samba for everything... but I'll do what I have to do...
--
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  Charles N. Owens                               Email: owensc at enc.edu
                                            http://www.enc.edu/~owensc
  Network & Systems Administrator
  Information Technology Services  "Outside of a dog, a book is a man's
  Eastern Nazarene College         best friend.  Inside of a dog it's
                                   too dark to read." - Groucho Marx
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