Netbench and Samba 2.2.1a

[Richard Sharpe]

On Thu, 13 Jun 2002, Don DeVitt wrote:

> My problem was caused by the fact that NT mapped drives are not
> accessible in exactly the same way by an application launched by
> a Remote Shell Daemon as they are from applications that
> are launched by the user from the desktop. The authentication is
> some how different enough to make the drive inaccessible without
> using the "security = share" smb.conf file setting. 
> This problem is documented by NT version of the rshd software
> (http://www.denicomp.com/rshdnt.htm). I initially missed it because 
> I usually use the W98 version of the RSHD software where the problem 
> does not occur.

Time to 'fess up :-)

I have been working with the SNIA CIFS Benchmarking WG towards developing 
a CIFS load generator.

While there are some good things about NetBench, there are a number of 
not-so-good things as well:

1. It is propietary.
2. It depends on the client and different clients can produce different
   workloads.
3. It requires a god-awfull number of PCs
4. It is not very flexible.

What I have done is to take the smbtorture stuff and extract it from Samba 
so that it is stand-alone, and then add the following sorts of 
capabilities:

1. Have separate phases, setup, warmup, and measurement phases.
2. Be able to synchronise all the client processes before they start 
   a phase.
3. It is driven by a similar sort of script language as the NetBench stuff
4. Soon be able to specify that separate runs of n, n+m, n+2m, etc be done
   before reporting.
5. Be able to force clients to disconnect from the server before running a
   phase so you do not bias the results because of setup or warmup.

However, there are still some deficiencies, like reporting is not great, 
and it is not easy to specify that certain actions should fail, and so on.

Also, in testing and benchmarking, it is useful to be able to specify some 
of the scripts algorithmically, so I am considering embedding a lot of 
this stuff in Perl or TCL (probably this since I do a lot of work with TCL 
where I am) or Python (to keep Tim happy).

There should be a paper or a WIP on our load generator :-) presented at 
CIFS2002 ...

Regards
-----
Richard Sharpe, rsharpe at ns.aus.com, rsharpe at samba.org, 
sharpe at ethereal.com