Delays opening Excel/Word files off samba shares.

[Steven Haigh]

At my work, I've been pushing linux as a server solution for quite some
time. They've decided to give it a go, and the main company file server is
now a piii 933 with 512Mb RAM, a promise 6 channel RAID5 controller (IDE),
and 6 x 80Gb drives.

It's running RedHat 7.1 (with the usual kernel updates to 2.4.10), with
samba 2.2.1a and the latest Reiser FS...

Now at the moment, we haven't mapped in any security (this is to come) and
are using various shares for various groups, mapping them in a Novell login
script via the 'net use' command.

Now the problems begin. We have around 250 employees, and around 50 or so of
them are heavy excel/word users. When opening a small excel file, the
operation can take up to 2 minutes. Most of this time appears to be network
(read samba) related. The application (in this case Excel) will just sit
there waiting.

If I copy the file from the samba share and place it on a local disk or
another network share that is not samba based, then everything works as it
should.

As you can imagine, I'm copping a lot of flack because of this "upgrade" to
"superior equipment" and I'm at a loss to explain why the delays are
happening - I have done a log level 5 and looked through, but can't find
anything significant to figure out what the hassles are. A log level 10 is
not really possible with the number of users on the system.

HELP!

Signed,
Steven Haigh

Out the 100Base-T, off the firewall, through the router, down the T1,
over the leased line, off the bridge, nothing but Net.

The net will not be what we demand, but what we make it. Build it well.