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Tue Dec 2 04:10:01 GMT 2003


other NT Administrators, its well worth the effort once its working in your
configuration. Down time will be less and server load should drop compared
to a NT Server.

>
> --- Mathew McKernan <mathewmckernan at optushome.com.au>
> wrote:
> > By the look of it, the reason why it is so slow is
> > the fact that you may not
> > be running a WINS Server. We had this problem with
> > NT boxes, yes Windows
> > Servers. We installed a Windows NT Server to be our
> > WINS server, it
> > increased the speed of the LAN dramatically. We now
> > run the WINS Server on a
> > Linux box running Samba.
>
> While this is a great way to increase speed,
> A. It's plenty fast on the NT, Netware, and other
> Samba servers.  In fact, the slowness appears to be
> totally isolated to the new Samba server.
> B. The slow browsing is on the hard drive once
> connected to the server, not cruising network
> neighborhood where WINS would be most effective.
> C. Our primary problem is data corruption, not
> performance, though they could be related.

Ok, I see your point. I seem to think it _may_ be a kernel level issue with
the device card for the RAID. Have you tried new drivers? Also check if this
"slowness" is local too with direct writes to the RAID.

>
> The random slowness might actually be our RAID setup
> or perhaps even oplocks.  Installing NT ought to show
> if we have a RAID problem.
>
> The corruption might be related to oplocks.  I'm doing
> research.
>
> Is it safe to disable kernel, regular, and level2
> oplocks if we're not doing any linux-side read/writes?
>

I can't answer this one. But I can say we use the default in samba without
hassle.

> > We have a home drive server which serves about 1800
> > users with 400 logged on
> > at one time drawing about 30MBps out of it server.
> > This box is a Pentium 4,
> > 512MB RAM. 400GB RAID server running Linux and
> > Samba.
>
> What card and type of drives?

An Adaptec model RAID controller with the I2O "protocol" (i cant remember
what model number but 2100S rings a bell).
12x 60GB disks (cant remember what brand, but I think they are Seagates?) in
a RAID 0+1 Array. 360GB available to be used.

>
> > My suggestion:
> > Install a WINS Server (simple 400MHz box even)
> > running Linux, and if you
> > like run an internal DNS too which is syncronised to
> > the WINS database using
> > the "wins hook" option in smb.conf. Point all your
> > devices' WINS addresses
> > to this new WINS server. You will notice a dramatic
> > improvement in
> > performance.
>
> I did try WINS in testing; I made one of the Samba
> servers a WINS server and pointed my workstation to
> it.  I didn't see other addresses caching in the Samba
> WINS database and often I would see "WINS server
> appears to be down" when using smbclient.  However, no
> other machines were using the WINS server, and the
> WINS server was not local subnet browse master, so
> that might have stopped me.

WINS will only work if every "device" on the LAN registers with the WINS
server. Device meaning Server, Workstation, PLCs etc. It _will_ reduce LAN
traffic as the amount of broadcasts are reduced, wether your using samba
servers, NT or Netware. Our WINS server is the local subnet master along
being domain master as well.

>
> Have you seen better documents on implementing Samba
> WINS than what is on samba.org or in /usr/share/doc?

In a nutshell:

In smb.conf add:
wins support = yes

And configure each device to have the IP (of the samba box running with wins
support=yes) in the WINS address field on each device.
On samba servers use this line in smb.conf :
wins server = ip.of.wins.server


>
> /dev/idal
>
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Thanks

Mathew




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