Samba, 20.000 users and concurrent logons: part 2

[werner maes]

Hello,

I wanted to let you know that I'm able to succesfully work with 20000
users and several concurrent logon sessions.
Instead of using /etc/smbpasswd or /etc/passwd, I chose to use
/var/db/password.db.
I created this file using the makefile which is located in the /var/db
directory.
I suppose this is an indexed version of /etc/passwd and works a lot
faster
than the regular flat file.
Also I changed the entries for passwd and shadow in /etc/nsswitch.conf
from
passwd    files nis ...            passwd     db
shadow    files nis ...     to    shadow    db

I have two Samba-servers:

Server1 (authentication server):
security = user
encrypt passwords = no
domain logons = yes

Server2 (server with the shares):
security = server
encrypt passwords = no
password server = server1

I've tested the servers with 50 logon sessions in about half a minute.
No
problems: all the clients were succesfully logged on. This was NOT the
case
when we used /etc/passwd or /etc/smbpasswd because of the heavy CPU-
consumption of the smbd processes (idle = 0%).
Although I refered to the databasefiles in /etc/nsswitch.conf, for some
strange
reason /etc/passwd was still used on the server with the share.
Therefore I used a standard /etc/passwd
file instead of the passwd file with the 20000 users. And this works
fine and fast.

I suppose it's in the Samba-code that it will look in /etc/passwd first
when you
have set security = server. Can anyone confirm this? So even if you tell
Linux
to use the database files, Samba won't necessarily do so.

My question:
If you have set security = server, for what processes exactly is
/etc/passwd
used?
I know that you NEED to have a account on the Samba server. This
is because the Unix operating system needs a username to perform various

I/O operations.

During these tests, I encountered some errors.

* When I deleted the entry 'smbpasswd file = /etc/smbpasswd'  (which I
don't need
   since I have encrypt passwords = no) and tried to restart the
daemons, I got the
  following error (on the server with the shares, server2):

  [2000/04/20 13:04:11, 0] passdb/passdb.c:pdb_generate_sam_sid(843)
  can't create private directory  : No such file or directory
  [2000/04/20 13:04:11, 0] smbd/server.c:main(658)
   ERROR: Samba cannot create a SAM SID.

* When a user succesfully logged on, I got these strange errors on the
authentication server..

[2000/04/25 09:28:48, 0] smbd/password.c:password_ok(551)
  Error: challenge not done for user=u19331

Maybe bugs?

By the way, as you can see I work with a Redhat distribution. The
location of
the files may be found in other directories if you work with another
distribution.

Kind regards,

Werner Maes
KULeuven
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