Comments request to refute arguments about Samba...

Peter Polkinghorne Peter.Polkinghorne at brunel.ac.uk
Tue Dec 14 11:02:48 GMT 1999


The Hermit Hacker said:
>         Samba is an implementation of old Lan Manager stuff. For a 
> listing of what real Lan Man did/does a reference is "Microsoft Lan 
> Manager, Programmer's Reference", MS Press, was $40.
>
>         With Lan Man one has groups, and groups, and uncounted more 
> groups.

Well we have 20,000 users, 40+ active Samba servers and 1 workgroup
(and of course no browsing).  NBT alluded to below means workgroups can span 
subnets.

> 	They use the word "shares" these days. And the wire is cheerfully 
> busy with NetBIOS vintage traffic, making bridging a must. Management 
> is equally delightful, especially security.

Samba does not work with vanilla unroutable NetBEUI, but with NBT (ie NetBIOS 
encapsulated over TCP - thus routable).  Using WINS (which Samba can provide) 
broadcast traffic can be reduced.

>         So if 1980 technology is good enough then use Samba. Think 
> small, don't interact, that's the stuff.

Well we are not a small site and use Samba successfully for home directories 
and applications servicing of NT machines (3,000+).
Also SMB is what is out there on PCs right now and while it has 80's origins 
(as does Netware) it is evolving!

>         An oh by the way on Solaris. Unless those machines are fully 
> patched and carefully sealed off then the bad guys will feast on them 
> and all machines they can reach via packet snoop programs. We have 
> had a very bad time with that part of things and the problems are not 
> over.

Well these days Solaris is reasonably well secured - all OS makers have woken 
up to varying extents to security needs - even Microsoft.

> There has been serious exploration of SAMBA as replacement for 
> Netware by the Systems Group here at UK. Right now, they are testing 
> a "Student Locker" system using SAMBA. It isn't widely in use yet, 
> but results have been promising (I guess). One concern has been the 
> amount of RAM needed for each SAMBA connection. On the test machine, 
> SMB connections are using ~3MB/connection. At that rate, we'd need 
> about 3GB of RAM to accomodate our ~1000 machines.

We have found that by trimming the smb.conf file we can get down to .75Mb for 
each connection - but this depends on what you are doing.

Finally a little ref for what we have done:

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/~peter/samba/

I hope to update when we have upgraded to 2.0.6 (from 1.9.18p10), as we have 
taken various measures to improve performance eg avoid AMD!
-- 
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| Peter Polkinghorne, Computer Centre, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UB8 3PH,|
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