[Samba] Win4Lin, MYOB, Samba & Performance

[Stuart Guthrie]

I'm having performance problems that seem to involve SAMBA in the
equation so I thought I'd ask if there was something obvious I'm
stuffing up or a known anomoly.

A mate of mine runs MYOB Premier (the brilliant (not!) multi-user
accounting package which claims to not support SAMBA (or visa versa). 

I've had it running glitch free for two years on a Samba share off a
linux box.

They are so pleased that they are going the next step to Win4Lin Server
Edition and Thin-client Linux X for desktop apps which have an OSS
equivelant. Currently they need to keep MYOB. 

Problem is that when they run Win4Lin thin-client from the server that
also runs the samba share, the only way to share the accounting database
with the other windows users is to do so via a network share - enter
SAMBA. 

If I run this single user mode (direct file access) in Win4Lin its
faster than windows. If I run using a network share served on the same
server by samba, its performance is OK. If I logon with another user
from a Win98 PC and share the same network database, the performance is
really really slow. There seems to be lots and lots of netbios traffic.
I'm not sure if this is a samba issue, a kernel issue, a win4lin issue
or an MYOB issue (which they will obviously not respond to).

Obviously a lot of this has to do with the interesting way MYOB have
chosen to implement database sharing. Unfortunately until it can be
replaced that is not fixable.

If someone in the samba community has 2c worth I'm all ears. It's
currently stopping me from going thin-client across this small but
growing company.

This may seem like a roight cowpat but it seems to be the only way I can
setup the requirement.

TIA

Stuart Guthrie