[Samba] Re: How Samba let us down

[Esh, Andrew]

Here at Tricord, we run Samba through some pretty intense tests, as well.
Since we are a file system producer, we focus on corruption bugs. We haven't
found any in Samba, other than a rather famous Microsoft Word bug that also
occurs on Windows servers. I'm not trying to chime in here, but if there was
the kind of bug someone would notice within the first few hours of use, we'd
have hit it hundreds of times already, just in our testing this week. We've
been testing like this for more than two years.

-----Original Message-----
From: John H Terpstra [mailto:jht at samba.org]
Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 1:04 PM
To: Jay Ts
Cc: jra at dp.samba.org; chris at devidal.tv; Mathew McKernan;
samba at lists.samba.org; samba-technical at lists.samba.org
Subject: Re: [Samba] Re: How Samba let us down


Jay,

For the record, I thouroughly test samba pre-releases before we ever ship.
To the best of my knowledge, NOT ONE version of samba we have released
ever CAUSED (or resulted in) file/data corruption. If I sound defensive -
that's is exactly correct because file corruption is a DEATH issue!

Please note: This does NOT include smbfs, which is not officially part of
Samba. I can make NO assertions regarding the integrity of smbfs as I
regard this as most undesirable technology. I do NOT test smbfs at all.

Every reported case of file corruption I have looked at has been due to:

	1. Bad or defective or low grade ethernet cards
	2. Defective HUBs / Ether-Switches
	3. Defective Hardware on the Server
	4. Incorrect Protocol Stack configuration on the MS Windows client

FHIW:	My current testbed consists of:

	Tyan 2460 motherboard, 2 X MP1600+ CPUs
	1 GB DDR2100 RAM
	1 Gigabit Intel Enternet
	2 x Intel EEpro100
	1 x 3Ware 7540 IDE RAID
		- 3 WD 60  GB IDE HdD
	2 x IBM 40GB IDE driver (native to system)
	Caldera OpenLinux 3.1.1 with 2.4.18 kernel with ACL patch applied.

Test load on system with up to 60 sessions doing full load work. Peak IDE
I/O bandwidth is 452 MBytes/sec. Peak network I/O is 117 MBytes/sec. Samba
peak I/O depends on nature of operations. In other words, I beat the
living daisies out of samba during test.

Tests done with Samba with Win9X, WinME, Win2K (Pro + Adv Server),
WinXPPro.

I can vouch for the fact that not one file corruption problem has been
detected during the 2.2.x series, nor on any prior series.

Cheers,
John T.


On Wed, 23 Oct 2002, Jay Ts wrote:

> Jeremy Allison (jra at dp.samba.org) wrote:
> > Jay Ts wrote:
> > >
> > > > The corruption might be related to oplocks.  I'm doing
>
> Just to keep myself out of more trouble today, I'd like
> to point out that I didn't write the above. ;-)
>
> > File corruption is treated as a drop everything - priority
> > 1 bug in Samba. If this were a generic problem known with
> > 2.2.6 we'd be issuing a patch *immediately*.
>
> I'm really lost at this point (too many replies to too many
> threads while having "one of those days"), but I think I/we
> suggested he _upgrade_ to 2.2.6, if he isn't already running
> a pretty recent release.
>
> I've seen problems in the early 2.2.x releases (when transferring
> large files) that could be perceived as (or called) "file corruption",
> but the problem went away sometime before 2.2.4.
>
> Jay Ts
>

-- 
John H Terpstra
Email: jht at samba.org
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