Timeout Issue with Samba CIFS Share

[Gruher, Joseph R]

Hello all, I'm hoping you could answer a question for me.

 

I have an x86 client running WinXP with a CIFS share mounted as drive Z.

The share comes off an xscale appliance running Linux kernel 2.6.10 and
Samba (not sure of version, but recent).

The xscale appliance has a USB device attached and mounted, the CIFS
share represents the USB device.

So, when copying files to the CIFS share on the client, they go to the
USB device.

 

The problem I have is this:

When copying a file it appears space is allocated on the USB device
equal to the size of the file and filled with zeros before the file copy
actually begins.  The WinXP client just sits and waits while this
happens.  If it waits to long I get an error message "Cannot copy X: The
specified network name is no longer available."  The copy then fails
(but allocation of space for the file on the USB device continues until
it completes, eventually resulting a file full of zeros).  The timeout
appears to be between 75 and 90 seconds.  For a large file and a slow
USB device space allocation can take minutes.

 

The speed of the USB device then effectively determines the maximum file
size that can be copied.

 

Question I have is:

Does this sound like normal behavior?  Is this behavior determined by
Samba or another part of the system?

Why does a file full of blank data have to be created before data can
begin to transfer from the client?

 

Thanks,

Joe