[Samba] Re: How Samba let us down

[Chris de Vidal]

The new NT server has a bad HD, so we have a repreive
temporarily and perhaps we can still work this problem
out and still use Samba (:

--- Mathew McKernan <mathewmckernan at optushome.com.au>
wrote:
> By the look of it, the reason why it is so slow is
> the fact that you may not
> be running a WINS Server. We had this problem with
> NT boxes, yes Windows
> Servers. We installed a Windows NT Server to be our
> WINS server, it
> increased the speed of the LAN dramatically. We now
> run the WINS Server on a
> Linux box running Samba.

While this is a great way to increase speed,
A. It's plenty fast on the NT, Netware, and other
Samba servers.  In fact, the slowness appears to be
totally isolated to the new Samba server.
B. The slow browsing is on the hard drive once
connected to the server, not cruising network
neighborhood where WINS would be most effective.
C. Our primary problem is data corruption, not
performance, though they could be related.

The random slowness might actually be our RAID setup
or perhaps even oplocks.  Installing NT ought to show
if we have a RAID problem.

The corruption might be related to oplocks.  I'm doing
research.

Is it safe to disable kernel, regular, and level2
oplocks if we're not doing any linux-side read/writes?

> We have a home drive server which serves about 1800
> users with 400 logged on
> at one time drawing about 30MBps out of it server.
> This box is a Pentium 4,
> 512MB RAM. 400GB RAID server running Linux and
> Samba.

What card and type of drives?

> My suggestion:
> Install a WINS Server (simple 400MHz box even)
> running Linux, and if you
> like run an internal DNS too which is syncronised to
> the WINS database using
> the "wins hook" option in smb.conf. Point all your
> devices' WINS addresses
> to this new WINS server. You will notice a dramatic
> improvement in
> performance.

I did try WINS in testing; I made one of the Samba
servers a WINS server and pointed my workstation to
it.  I didn't see other addresses caching in the Samba
WINS database and often I would see "WINS server
appears to be down" when using smbclient.  However, no
other machines were using the WINS server, and the
WINS server was not local subnet browse master, so
that might have stopped me.

Have you seen better documents on implementing Samba
WINS than what is on samba.org or in /usr/share/doc?

/dev/idal

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site
http://webhosting.yahoo.com/