[Samba] MS Access and RAID

[Harry Mills]

On Mon, 28 Oct, Noel Kelly  wrote:
> I'll let someone with more knowledge than I get into the RAID buffer
> discussions but just wanted to make sure you had the same smb.conf on the
> two machines?  And therefore had oplocks turned off?

Yep, identical smb.conf files.

The boxes are identical in both config and hardware (Cobalt Qube 3,) Only
difference is, the new box has two ide drives with software raid, the old box
doesn't. The boxes are not standard Cobalt builds btw.

I am sure there are many people out there who come across this situation:-

The people who wrote the database application say 'it can't possibly be Access,
and we have never seen these problems before, it must be your samba server', or
' Well it works on a windows share' ;)

Refering to the posting you mentioned:

The code files, and MSAccess binary are held locally on the workstations, the
database data is held on the samba share, with oplocks off. Checked the
smb.conf, which follows the recommendations from the post below.

Then thing that is puzzling me is that if I copy the DB back to the old server,
kill samba on the new server, start samba on the old, and reboot the
workstations, it all starts working again - fast.

I suppose the next step is to rebuild the new server, as a non-raided box, and
test again!

> A recent posting which you might have already seen:
> 
> 	1.  Always run the Access database application, (Forms, code,
> queries, ...) on a client workstation and have the back-end data on the
> server.  The application container links to the shared tables on the server.
> 
> 	2.  Oplocks = no 
> 	3.  Kernel Oplocks = no 
> 	4.  Level2 Oplocks = no 
> 	5.  Blocking Locks = yes 
> 	6.  Locking = yes 
> 	7.  Strict Locking = no 
> 	8.  Share Modes = yes
> 
> Success will be improved if you follow the pessimistic locking model for
> most of your data access.  This means that the edited record is always
> locked.  You should do this regardless of whether you use Windows or Samba
> on your back end server.  This also applies to point number 1.
> 
> HTH
> Noel
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harry Mills [mailto:harry at navaho.co.uk]
> Sent: 28 October 2002 08:57
> To: samba at lists.samba.org
> Subject: [Samba] MS Access and RAID
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We have been having a few problems with a M$ Access DB held on a Samba
> server
> 
> Samba version: samba-2.2.4-2N1
> 
> We have rebuilt a new server, and transferred the database over to the new
> box, along with word/excel docs etc. Everything is working fine, except the
> access database, which is running very very slowly (can be over a minute to
> open a record).
> Details are a little sketchy, but it would seem that when the new server is
> being used, one workstation has reasonable access speeds, but subsequent
> workstations are slow - although this could be a 'user diagnosis syndrome'
> ;)
> 
> The access binary is held locally on the workstations.
> If you transfer the database back to the old samba server, it runs fine.
> The two servers are running the same version of samba, same Kernel (2.4.18).
> The workstations are Windows98, doing domain logons to the Samba server.
> 
> The only difference I can see between the old and new servers, is the new
> server has two raided (mirror) IDE drives, the old server is a single drive
> box. There are no errors on the NICS, oplocks are off for *.mdb and *.ldb
> and
> tcpdump shosw data flowing consistently between the server and the
> workstation. The Load Ave on the box is near enough 0.0.
> 
> For the moment, I have put them back on the old server.
> 
> Any help would be gratefully received - bit stumped on this one!


-- 
Harry Mills                                        DDI:01749 812100
Educational Development Manager                    Fax:01749 812749
Navaho Technologies                                Main Office: 0870 7034015
http://www.navaho.co.uk/