SV: [Samba] Samba-Citrix compatability

[perkjetil.grotnes at pbe.oslo.kommune.no]

> From: Andrew Bartlett [mailto:abartlet at samba.org] 
> > - Compilation issues regarding Citrix/metaframe
> > - - ie the need to increase the MAX_CONNECTION setting before
> > compilation
> Please file a bug against this.  There is no valid reson for 
> us to allow 2^16 session setups, but only 2^8 tree connects.

Hmm, The "bug" I tried to refere to is the "smbd/conn.c: #define
MAX_CONNECTIONS".
If you have Citrix/Metaframe the default value (128? 256?) is way to
low.  
This would be the max amount of "connections" from a single machine,
right?  

Quote from "conn.c" : 
/* set these to define the limits of the server. NOTE These are on a
per-client basis. Thus any one machine can't connect to more than
MAX_CONNECTIONS services, but any number of machines may connect at
one time. */

On each of our Citrix servers we can have up to 100 users all connecting
to 10 shares 
on the samba server = 1000 connections 'services' for that one citrix
server?  

> > - the home-share issue and problem
> What is this one in particular?

Well, I am not sure this is a bug.  More of an issue.  

If you use 

[home-disk]
path = /home/%U/

and profile path in user manager in windows mapping H: to
\\server\home-disk

You would get serious problems with files having the same name on two
home-dirs.  It would be a locking problem on the windows side.

User1 opens "iloveyou.doc" on his home-dir for writing would yield a
\\server\home-disk\iloveyou.doc lock.
User2 opens "iloveyou.doc" on her home-dir and windows would think this
was the same \\server\home-disk\iloveyou.doc and get a message the file
was locked.  Even though these were 

/home/user1/iloveyou.doc and 
/home/user2/iloveyou.doc.

The fix is to use

[homes]
path = /home/%S

And a user manager profile H: mapping to \\server\%username%

Thus the path above would not (for windows) be:

\\server\user1\iloveyou.doc and
\\server\user2\iloveyou.doc

In most other environments other than Citrix this would not be a problem
(ie w2k workstation clients).

> > All these issues, and probably more, I feel are related to 
> > Citrix/metaframe vs. Samba.  If I am wrong and somewhere there is a 
> > FAQ regarding this then all the better.  Just need to find 
> it. ;-)  If 
> > not then it is most neeeded.
> So, when can we expect the patch (seriously, if you can get 
> it started, you might just tempt some of our poor 
> documentation slaves.)

We have run Samba since about '97 with Citrix winframe/metaframe.  It
works.  But there still are issues.
I keep an eye on all Citrix/Metaframe posts on this mailinglist and I
mean I have seen some attempts of patches for Citrix.  But unfortunatly
nothing that has stuck to anywhere reachable (FAQ).

We have tuned the samba installation compilation, unix-settings and
smb.conf so that it now works fairly well.  We still have some weird
"cannot save" happenings once a day or so, but nothing really critical.
I must admit that we are still running 2.2.6 since from the changelog
for 2.2.8 we could not find any related fixes to Citrix problems.

> > And Samba4?  What is this? :-) Due 2005?
> A research project, that has stripped out all the basic 
> assumptions from Samba, and is building it all from scratch 
> again.  Very interesting.  The very brave can check out the 
> samba4 repository, but it's not something even close to 
> functional yet (the posix backend - ie, access to a unix 
> filesystem is yet to be reimplemeted).

Yes, sounds very interesing indeed.  

Regards
Per Kjetil Grotnes