[Samba] How Samba let us down
Adam Lang
aalang at rutgersinsurance.com
Wed Oct 23 14:29:03 GMT 2002
That was uncalled for.
Adam Lang
Systems Engineer
Rutgers Casualty Insurance Company
http://www.rutgersinsurance.com
----- Original Message -----
From: "tim smith" <tims at cqpl.com.au>
To: <samba at lists.samba.org>
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 2:23 AM
Subject: Re: [Samba] How Samba let us down
> err are you asking for help, or just wasting our time?
> sounds like you have a big job ahead of you tonight setting up that NT
> machine better get that out of the way before telling us your life story
> like that....
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Chris de Vidal" <cdevidal at yahoo.com>
> To: <samba at lists.samba.org>
> Cc: <samba-technical at lists.samba.org>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 4:13 PM
> Subject: [Samba] How Samba let us down
>
>
> > Before you read this, I want to state (for reasons
> > listed below) that I don't expect an answer (advice is
> > welcomed, but please read this email carefully before
> > answering). I'm sharing this with the community with
> > the hope that better software results from our sad
> > experience...
> >
> > BACKGROUND
> >
> > I've been using NT for 4 years, Netware and Linux for
> > 3 years, and Samba for almost 2. I work in the IT
> > department of a medium-sized unit of a global
> > advertising company. We have a Netware and NT
> > environment with a bit of Linux.
> >
> > We installed a 280GB IDE Samba archive server (rare
> > usage) and a 15GB SCSI Mac/Samba file server (medium
> > usage). We also use Samba for more menial tasks like
> > smbmounts and file transfers. We thought we were
> > comfortable with Samba. We knew we were comfortable
> > with other types of file servers.
> >
> > OUR SETUP
> >
> > Going from my tired memory:
> > Athlon MP 1.8GHz (mem=nopentium)
> > 2GB ECC SDRAM
> > Tyan S2460(I think?)
> > Antec 450W PS
> > Lots of cooling
> > 5 IBM DeskStar 120GB drives with 8MB caches in RAID 5
> > 3ware 7580(I think?) 8-port hardware RAID
> > 3ware hot-swappable drive cages
> > Intel e1000 Gigabit NIC, full duplex, 1000MBit,
> > autonegotiation off
> > 3com Gigabit switch, autonegotiation off
> > RedHat 7.3
> > Kernel 2.4.19 with ACL support
> > ext3 with ACL support
> > Samba 2.2.5 with ACL support installed from a
> > recompiled SRPM from the samba.org FTP site.
> > Winbind
> > NO nfs daemon (I hear it's buggy w/ ACLs)
> >
> > We have a variety of clients, from DOS and OS/2 to
> > Windows (9x-2000) and Linux. The server acts as a
> > print spooling area (the actual queues are on an NT
> > server) and scratch area for database programmers to
> > manipulate their flat database files. As far as I
> > know, these files are not commonly accessed by more
> > than one user at a time.
> >
> > THE PROBLEM
> >
> > For the past year, our heaviest-used Netware server
> > has been under more and more stress.. filling up,
> > running out of licenses, slowing down, etc.
> > Preliminary tests using Samba on a fast Linux box
> > showed anywhere from 70% to 1000% speed improvements,
> > depending on the task. The decision was made to
> > switch it to Linux; the whole company is migrating
> > away from Netware and we (as a unit, not speaking for
> > the company) don't want to be completely trapped into
> > Windows if we can help it.
> >
> > The new hardware arrived and more preliminary tests
> > indicated all looked good. We were set to switch last
> > Saturday night. We turned off logins to the Netware
> > box, backed it up, restored it to the new Linux box,
> > set permissions, then made sure the various computers
> > in the building could log in.
> >
> > Yesterday, our first day, was rough. For most of the
> > day we fought random slow browsing with no
> > explanation. Clients would appear to lock up for
> > several seconds. We found some misconfigurations in
> > smb.conf but the problems reappeared. No errors were
> > seen in any machines' logs on debug level 2. I
> > trimmed the smb.conf to a minimal number of options
> > and that seemed to help with the slowness. Today,
> > however, the problem reappeared a few times with no
> > errors in the logs that we could see.
> >
> > The printers were missing some of the records sent to
> > them to print, something that had never happened with
> > Netware. Every time the missing records were
> > different. Occasionally, it would work right.
> > Oplocks (kernel, level I and II) were left to defaults
> > (turned on).
> >
> > THE OUTCOME
> >
> > Sadly, tonight we are installing a Windows NT server.
> > Installing a brand new server is actually cheaper for
> > us than the 8 or so hours of downtime to back up the
> > server, install NT on it, and restore the data to it.
> > We don't want to revert to Netware because so many
> > clients have been reconfigured to log on only to the
> > domain (DOS, OS/2, etc.) and that would require many
> > more hours reversing those changes. Also, some files
> > have been added since leaving Netware. We also
> > decided to proceed to use NT because is more proven in
> > this capacity.
> >
> > CONCLUSION
> >
> > To be fair, the problems could be related to some
> > misconfiguration. I have pasted the smb.conf below.
> >
> > I fear it might just be an oplock problem, but it is
> > not clear what would result if more than one user
> > happened to try to write to a file with them disabled.
> > Every advice we found said to leave them on to
> > prevent corruption and to improve performance. We ran
> > out of time to test it, and feared what failure would
> > bring. Running this:
> > grep -r -B5 -A5 oplock /var/log/samba/ | grep -B5 -A5
> > error
> > produced only 5 of these errors
> > oplock_break: receive_smb error (Connection reset by
> > peer)
> > from the same DOS machine from 2 days worth of all
> > machines' logs running at debuglevel 1 (some at level
> > 2). I don't know if that is a good indicator of an
> > oplock problem. I can do other greps on request.
> >
> > Unfortunately, we can't test out your suggestions in
> > production, and our off-production testing apparently
> > can't stress it well enough. So please just take this
> > email as input - I'm not looking for answers here,
> > though advice is appreciated.
> >
> > The problem could also have been environment or
> > hardware. We should know soon, as we are going to
> > reinstall the original Samba server with NT, and the
> > problems should reappear if hardware or environment.
> > If we do find that to be true, I will certainly reveal
> > our findings to this mailing list.
> >
> > And perhaps the problem was with ACLs. We couldn't
> > turn them off in production to test that theory.
> >
> > It is likely that we will try Samba in this capacity
> > again in the future with a more mature version.
> >
> > Thanks for listening,
> > /dev/idal
> >
> >
> > [global]
> > server string =
> > workgroup = <our domain>
> > password server = <our PDC>
> > security = domain
> > encrypt passwords = yes
> > smb passwd file =
> > /etc/samba/smbpasswd
> > veto files = /lost+found/
> > winbind uid = 10000-20000
> > winbind gid = 10000-20000
> > winbind separator = +
> > create mask = 660
> > force create mode = 660
> > directory mask = 0770
> > force directory mode = 0770
> > log file =
> > /var/log/samba/%m.log
> > debuglevel = 2
> >
> > [print]
> > path = /share/print
> > writeable = yes
> >
> > __________________________________________________
> > Do you Yahoo!?
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> > http://webhosting.yahoo.com/
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