[Samba] Samba servers

[Gerry George]

Sometimes, I question my needs also. Maybe if I clarify what we are doing, it will help
you understand my situation. Like I said initially, I'm new to this so please excuse my
ignorance. Now having said that, here is the overall situation. (I'll try to keep it
short). :)

The project I am involved with concerns implementing HIPAA for South Carolina's Medicaid
system. This involves the use of EDI Transaction Sets in both batch and real-time. For
real-time I created some socket servers that receive/respond to the data one transaction
at a time via TCP/IP. So far so good.

Now we have to address the high volume situations where our clients will be sending a
multitude of transactions for (Claims, Queries, Status Requests, etc.). These will all
be in EDI format. Users will FTP them to a mailbox for input to our Translator that is
Windows based. The Translator will split the different Transactions out into separate
files. These files will be put into a data repository under windows and some of these
files must be accessible by our UNIX system.

Originally, I was going to use FTP on UNIX to receive the files, process them and then
FTP the updated files back. The Translator would then deposit the updates into the
Client's mailbox. My whole purpose of going with SAMBA revolves around performance
issues. If I could have UNIX access the files directly from a shared drive that resides
on Windows, (because that is where the Translator lives), then I could get rid of the
two FTP steps and save oodles of processing time. Anyway, that is why I was wanting to
know about setting up a SAMBA server in a Windows environment that could be accessed by
UNIX.

I have had some people tell me that SAMBA is quite chatty and since there would be a lot
of I/O, I'm not sure if Samba would be more efficient than FTP'ing the files down,
processing them and FTP'ing them back. Programming-wise the FTP route is the simplest,
but I am hoping that SAMBA might be more efficient when dealing with large data volumes.

I hope this explains things a little better. I'm also open to suggestions for a better
approach.

Thanks.

Gerry

>> I would like to be able to have the system on the
>> UNIX box be able to read the files on
>> Windows by using SAMBA to make it a mountable drive.
>> Is that possible?
>
> Well, first off, I question your needs here but you
> know what you want better than anyone.
>
> Second, if you wan to simply mount a Winblowz
> partition on a Unix box (I've only used RedHat to do
> this), using the command;
>
> mount -t smbfs //foo/bar /foobar -o username=foo
>
> would work.  Do a man mount to see if -t smbfs is
> valid in your Unix.
>
> Also, I know that if you build Samba, there is an
> option to build smbmount as well as the smbmount that
> comes in RedHat is a bit wierd and I believe is not a
> product of samba.org but rather a product of RedHat.
>
> Bri-
>
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