James Nord's reply to Win2K and multiple Samba 2.07 servers

[James Nord]

G+D Computing Pty Ltd wrote:

> The software in question can generate large files, up to 2 gig,  some 
> reads are buffered but not all. But it goes a bit further than this,  
> why does NT4.0 and Win2K behave so differently with network 
> read/writes ?  

Internally to W2k there are a lot of differences/ new API's & APIs that 
have been removed/modified.

Just look at the way SQL7 was faster on NT4 then 2k and SQL2000 is 
faster on 2k than NT4.

> Obivously there are of differences between the two, but if Win95 
> through to ME and NT4.0 do a decent job, seems a bit strange that 
> Win2K can't deliver the same peformance. Incidently reading the file 
> from NT4.0 to Win2K seems to have no problem.

This would seem to indicate a probelm with samba.  I am not a samba 
developer but I would suggest that you increase the debugging level of 
samba and then send/post on the web a snippet of you log file.

The thing that springs immediatly to mind is something wierd going on 
with oplocks.

> I tried setting security = server and set password server to the name 
> of  the other samba server and edited the hosts file to make sure it 
> could find  it okay. Pinging the hostname is fine, but authenticating 
> a windows client  would not work. I'll try again, it was late at night 
> I was tired etc, could  somebody confirm that you need to have a local 
> account for every smb user ? 

Yes the users need to have an account on that machine (but it need not 
be local - could be NIS etc)

/James

> 
> 
> Edmund
> 
> 
>> G+D Computing Pty Ltd wrote:
>> 
>>> Hello to all,
>>> This is my first ever use of a mailing list so bear with my 
>>> ramblings and  illiterate prose.
>>> I have been using samba from 2.03 to 2.07 for over a year now. We 
>>> run  DHCP, WINS on the samba (acting as domain) box running Mandrake 
>>> 6.0.  Windows machines are running everything from Win95 up to 
>>> Win2K. With  Win2K I have problems with slow read/write, 
>>> particularly for one  application which reads byte by byte.
>> 
>> 
>> I assume you have tried to see if the application has any updates?
>> 
>>> This program stores its data files on the server. Both ftp and 
>>> Windows  explorer file speed is very similar, so I don't like to 
>>> point the finger  at Samba. But this application reading byte by 
>>> byte is painfully slow. I  note the 2nd read of the same file is 
>>> much faster, but I assume this is  Win2K caching the file. If I turn 
>>> off oplocks, then always the same file  read is slow.
>>> It's got to the point where I have removed Win2K and gone back to 
>>> NT4.0  sp6. NT4.0 has no speed file read problems. Is there 
>>> something nasty in  Win2K that you guys may know ?
>>> It seems like there is an overhead for calling a byte read which is  
>>> inefficient, but surely the operating system (Win2K) can compensate 
>>> for this ?
>>> I think the general network is okay, and since NT4.0 and other 
>>> windows  boxes have no problem, what's Win2K doing special ?
>>> SP1 is installed on win2k computers (well it was when I was running it)
>>> I've found samba to be very reliable and stable. I've recently added 
>>> a  2nd Samba server running Redhat 6.2. I wanted the share 
>>> authentication to  be done via the first samba's smb password list,
>> 
>> 
>> look at
>> security = server
>> password server = <name-of-server>
> 
> 


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