Smbpasswd and 20.000 users

[Peter Samuelson]

[werner maes]
> I have defined 20.000 users on a Samba-server. The samba-server takes
> care of domain logons.
[...]
> The server is a Pentium 166 MHz. If we would user a faster server,
> things would be better, but I still fear errors when many users log
> on at the same time since our worst case scenario is that 200 users
> log on simultaneously (we have 9 pc-rooms).

Try asking an NT guru for tips on tuning an NT Server for 200
simultaneous logins in a database of 20000 users, all from a single
Pentium 166 PDC.  The immediate answer: "You must be mad.  Upgrade
immediately."  This is what I love about Samba and Unix: these kinds of
things are actually possible.

I think you've hit on the right solution -- database files instead of a
flat text file.  I don't know if this has been implemented in Samba; I
don't see any evidence that it has.  Alternatively, you can make use of
an external database.  Samba-TNG seems to have some support for LDAP,
LDAP/Windows 2000, and MySQL as database backends.  (Of those three, I
believe Samba-2.0.6 only supports LDAP.)  One advantage to using a
client-server approach like these is that it makes it easy to share the
workload between two computers (the database server and the Samba
server).

Peter