samba 2.2.1a and WAN-Shares

[Dirk Westfal]

Hi out there, 
I`ve not a real problem (currently), but a few questions on wan-wide (read: 
low bandwidth) share distribution with samba 2.2.1a. The setup described 
below was developed in a hurry (was needed by tomorrow :-\). 
Are there better ways to do this? 
What are the pros and cons of using the msdfs - options in this situation? 
Has anyone set up a similar share topology? If so, would you tell me about
your experiences?  

thanks in advance,
Dirk 




the "environment"

We have around 30 remote locations connected to the company hq via isdn with 
dial on demand lines (bw ranges from 64 (common) -> 512kb(few special 
sites))  to get access to some sap-like services and email/internet.

the "requirements" 
Some of our remote locations have the need to exchange data (mostly office 
docs with 10 to 1000kb in size) between each other in real time.
Each of these remote locations has it`s own local samba pdc.


the "workaround" i came up with:
Because we already had an samba running in the dmz to ease maintanace of the
companys intranet from the headquarters network, i decided to create a share 
on the dmz-samba and to do a remote mount from each of the remote servers. 
(mount -t smbfs -o username=xxx,password=xxx,dmask=0777  - yeah thats a bit 
risky but security is not an issue at this level yet - and there will be soon 
a central ldapserver to authenticate against;  in the meantime we do access 
control at ip-addr/network level)
I then redistributed the mounted remoteshare on the remote servers as a share 
which is then mounted as networked drive (r:) from the clients at the remote 
locations.  


The simplified topology is currently:
		

	[ HQ - dmz  ]
		|----- SAMBA (visible to all remote locations)
		|	|------ REMOTESHARE
		|	|------		
	
	[ HQ - dmz ] 
	   |	|	
	   |	remoteserver2
	   |	//samba/remoteshare - > [ SMBREMOTE]  
	   |			
	remoteserver1		
	//samba/remoteshare -> [ SMBREMOTE ]	


So far this  setup seems to work, though the logs get sometimes filled with 
messages like "broken oplock":  
When accessing the r: drive form a Win95/98 Client at a remote site, theres 
only a short interruption until the line to the samba in the hq-dmz comes up.
If the line is already up, theres no difference at all (last week we had one 
service-tech who backuped a users data to the r: drive - regardless of the 
users existing home dir - well it was a little slow for some 100 Megs... over 
a 128kb line.) 

 

-- 
Dirk Westfal (EDV/NETADMIN) <dirk.westfal at frankfurter-verein.de>
Key fingerprint = 8D7F 71D3 239A FA48 5E73  F1DE D460 E97F 83B0 1F89
"assumption is the mother of all screw-ups" (unknown)