[Samba] Samba limitations

[Andrew Bartlett]

On Wed, 2002-11-06 at 08:40, Rick Segeberg wrote:
> My company is seriously considering moving our existing NetWare 4.11
> file servers to Samba Linux servers (Red Hat 8).  Our current servers
> hold (on average) 400GB of data each (some much more) on various volumes
> (our largest volume at this time is 400GB).  Most of this space is used
> by multimedia files which are >1GB up to 4GB (yes, for a single file).
> We have about 200 users who have access to various directories across
> all of the servers, although we hope to consolidate that by making a
> separate server(s) for each major department.
> 
> 1) What kind of limitation (if any) does Samba have in being a file
> server?  By that I mean are there limitations on file sizes, volume
> sizes, number of files, number of users connected, performance issues,
> etc.  

Many of these are issues with the filesystem and Linux itself, rather
than Samba.  As such, using RedHat 8.0 is a good start - it gets you the
large file support etc.  (So 4GB should not be an issue).  Volume sizes
depend on the filesystem - I would suggest you get SGI's XFS enabled
kernel.

200 users isn't an issue, but you will want to use Samba 2.2.6 for
sendfile support.  (Increases performance, enable --with-sendfile. 
Enabled by default in 3.0).

If you have a lot of similarly names files, look into the 'mangling
method' smb.conf parameter - set to hash2 for better performance, (the
new default in 3.0).

> 2) Has anyone found a good way to add space to an existing volume
> (something easy to do in NetWare) via RAID, stripping or whatever?  In
> other words, I will need to add space in the future by adding a hard
> drive and spanning an existing volume across that new hard drive.  I
> know I can do it via mount points, but that gets messy, and only adds
> space to the directory structure in which you mount the new drive,
> rather than to the entire volume.  We will be using RAID 5 (hardware
> based), but even after adding a drive to the array, you somehow have to
> expand the volume across the new space.

You will want to look into things like LVM, but I've not used this
myself.

> 3) What are the gotchas on file system rights?  We do not have a PDC at
> this time, but when Samba 3.0 is final, would like to use our existing
> Windows 2000 AD domain (which is not actually used as a domain right
> now, but only for Exchange/Outlook functionality) to help manage those
> rights.

Samba 2.2 also supports integration into a Win2k domain, if you need
it.  The changes with 3.0 just make it use the native Win2k protocols
(with subsequent gains in efficiency, kerberos support etc).

The XFS kernel from SGI has ACL support, which can mirror most of the NT
ACL functionality.  There is a patch around for real NT ACLs if you
really want them.

> I would appreciate your feedback.  Samba is my file server at home, but
> that doesn't even compare to what we're looking at here.  Any advice,
> what not to do, etc. is welcome.

The big advise is to use the latest release, test, and find the areas
where it hurts.  Then come back and see what can be done about them.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/attachments/20021106/dc74deb0/attachment.bin