[Samba] SAMBA and NFS

[Robert Adkins]

Eric Boehm wrote:

>On Wed, Jul 07, 2004 at 02:49:30PM -0400, bastard operater wrote:
>  
>
>>>>>>"bastard" == bastard operater <bofh1234 at hotmail.com> writes:
>>>>>>            
>>>>>>
>
>    bastard> Thank you for the response.  Would there still be a
>    bastard> performance problem if I had two NICs in the PC?  One to
>    bastard> connect to the NFS share and the second NIC to connect to
>    bastard> the windows PCs?  I am talking about a maximum of 20
>    bastard> people connecting to the samba share with at most 5-6
>    bastard> people passing data over the share.  The samba server
>    bastard> would be a 2.2GHz PC with 512MB of RAM.
>
>I don't think that will help you. I am talking about the overhead of
>the two protocols. 
>
>For example, if you were access files via NFS, you might see something
>like this
>
>client -> NFS -> NFS server
>
>and for samba
>
>client -> SMB (CIFS) -> Samba server
>
>However, in your example,
>
>client -> SMB (CIFS) -> Samba server -> NFS -> NFS server
>
>The client has to go through two network file systems to get to the
>data.
>
>
>  
>
    Not really much of a slowdown. I have that confirugation setup 
within my own network with roughly 25 users. Primarily, they are 
accessing Samba from the server hosting the files, however if need be 
those Samba shares can be accessed via NFS then Samba off the second 
Server. I configured the two servers 'identically' with the second 
server running an rsyne between the 'share' and a 'share2' over NFS, 
that way if the primary server fails, all I need to do is change umount 
'share2' and remount it as 'share' and voila no other changes are 
necesary, since the same fileshares are already available through Samba 
via both servers.

    If I wanted to, I could quickly edit the smb.conf file to change the 
'server' name the second server broadcasts and within a few minutes 
everyone will be 'reconnected' to the 'original' server.

    In my tests, there really is very little difference in performance.

    -Rob