Beware: Samba is a hoax (Not!)

[Stephen L Arnold]

When the world was young, alex at avantel.com carved some runes like this:

> On Sat, 6 Feb 1999 alex at avantel.com wrote:
> 
> > I can only conclude that Samba is an elaborate hoax and here's why.
> [snip]
> 
> How many client machines have you tried this on?
> 
> It looks like your client(s) (is|are) thoroughly broken.

I agree.  I'd say you either have a broken NIC, or your windoze 
TCP/IP settings are screwing it up.  If you have specified the 
windoze TCP/IP parameters (ie, MaxMTU, RWIN, etc) then remove them 
from the registry (this will set MTU back to the default value of 
1500 and no RWIN setting).  If retrieving files now works, try a 
different RWIN value (either higher or lower than about 3072; don't 
ask me why ;-)

It really *does* work; it's just that there are so may broken parts 
of windoze (eg, the network redirector) and variations in essential 
windoze DLLs (again, mostly critical system components) that it's 
almost impossible to accommodate them all.  Personally, I think the 
samba guys have done an *excellent* job - if I can get it to work 
(multiple times even!) then anybody can.  It's just that setting up 
linux/samba tends to expose network/hardware/client problems that 
were always there (but masked by the general flakiness of windoze 
and/or cheap hardware)...

I'll be happy to try and confuse the issue some more if you'd 
like...

Steve