Smbpasswd and 20.000 users

[werner maes]

At 13:37 15/04/2000 -0500, Peter Samuelson wrote:
>
>[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).

What I've done so far:

* I've set encrypt passwords = no
* Applied the registry patch on my clients
* Use a databased version of /etc/passwd, /var/db/password.db. I do not know
  whether it's possible to create a database file from /etc/smbpasswd. 
* I've done some tests with LDAP (openldap). This seems to work but I still
  have to test whether it works fine with 60 concurrent logins. With LDAP 
  it's possible to do authentication against the LDAP-server instead of
passwd.
* Ideas?

Werner