Delays opening Excel/Word files off samba shares.

[Charles Marcus]

This is another area that concerns me.

I've been reading a lot about problems with Office files.

Does anyone know of the specific circumstances where these problems arise?
Or is it a mystery?

Charles

> -----Original Message-----
> From: samba-admin at lists.samba.org
> [mailto:samba-admin at lists.samba.org]On
> Behalf Of Steven Haigh
> Sent: Thursday, December 13, 2001 9:52 PM
> To: samba at lists.samba.org
> Subject: Delays opening Excel/Word files off samba shares.
>
>
> 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