sharing out nfs mounted filesystems with samba

David Collier-Brown davecb at canada.sun.com
Fri May 11 15:09:24 GMT 2001


Tim wrote:
>  						My question is,
> if I set up a system with GB ethernet, and nfs mounted each filesystem I
> wanted to share, and _then_ shared those out to the PC's via samba, would
> I suffer any major performance issues? 

	Latency would go up, which the end-users would 
	see as slowness, especially on large directories
	and small files.

	Total network bandwidth used doubles.

	For small numbers of users, this is no big deal.
	I run this at work, to avoid having more than one
	server, but I know it doesn't scale.
	Consider it a "application-level gateway", and
	size it appropriately.

>					 Does samba handle sharing nfs
> mounted filesystems ok?  

	Well, sorta.
	File service is fine, but locking is problematic:
	you need to run linux or irix to get the locks right.
	Oplocks will cause some strange delays when updating a
	file from both unix and the PC...

	Fortunately, very few unix programs use any kind of locks,
	and still work fine.  This is noit true of databases,
	and pc programs which have a database part (eg, calendars,
	customer-tarckers, etc).

--dave
-- 
David Collier-Brown,           | Always do right. This will gratify 
Performance & Engineering Team | some people and astonish the rest.
Americas Customer Engineering  |                      -- Mark Twain
(905) 415-2849                 | davecb at canada.sun.com




More information about the samba-technical mailing list