[Samba] best filesystem choice for samba (was: new user cannotlogon)

[rruegner]

Hi,
i have running ext3 with quota lvm acl support and samba,
with no problems on suse 9 , but i dont have trillards of files or files 
bigger than 2G to test.
The Story seems to be that filesystems arent implemented same good on 
every distro / kernels, so i was not able to implement xfs and samba on 
suse 9 , but i know this works with debian sarge ( cant remember the 
kernel ) . I have a few share partitions with reiserfs and acl which 
works very nice with suse 9.
Suse 9.1 seems to have major Problems with xfs.
( suse 9.1 is not a big shoot, you should only use it for needing kernel 
  2.2.6 features )
So i recommend to use ext3 as the best deal ( maybe dont i special 
cases, ie. large shares with millions of files here xfs is the better one )
VFAT is a simply outdated system, as the only thing which may make you 
happy that you can mount it under any win system, this might be helpfull
on small portable usb/firewire storages which can be used for backup in 
smaller filestores with samba.
Best Regards

Malcolm Baldridge schrieb:
> Quoting Mark Lidstone <mlidstone at bmtseatech.co.uk>:
> 
> 
>>ARGH!  I'm wondering if airing thoughts about VFAT performance publicly
>>was a good idea.
> 
> 
> I doubt VFAT's case insensitivity would be worth dealing with its terrible
> linear-search-time directory lookup methods.
> 
> The reason I suggested reiserfs (or ext3 with directory hashing) is to
> reduce the high costs of locating a directory entry within a directory of
> many (> 10,000) files.
> 
> msdos/vfat does not offer superior directory lookup times, and from my
> limited testing, neither does NTFS.
> 
> ext2/ext3 in stock configuration is also slow, though it appears very recent
> kernels/ext2fsutils offer an FFS-like "directory hashing" option which needs
> a format-time decision to be made upon setting up the filesystem.
> 
> I have no knowledge about XFS or JFS and how they compare.  I know both are
> "industrial" filesystems brought down from the Ivory Towers onto the
> pipsqueak platforms.
> 
> As for "horror stories", well, each filesystem has had their respective
> tales of misery and woe... ext3 had shocking and fatal dataloss bugs in the
> adolescent versions of 2.4.x., and some RAID + reiserfs configs saw some
> real wowsers as well.  From bug reports/changelogs, I've seen similar tales
> of woe for XFS and JFS if you trigger just the right combination of things.
> 
> 
>>>From my own experiences, things have matured and stabilised with reiserfs
> 
> and ext3 to the point where using either is fine for my purposes.
> 
> The decision comes down to:
> 
> 1) Do you need quotas?  If yes, you cannot use reiserfs.
> 2) Do you need ACLs?  If yes, only ext2/ext3 has well-tested seamless
> support, though I think there are wildcat patches to bring this to XFS (and
> maybe others) as well.  I'm not sure about the stability of this.
> 
> ext3 used with -O dir_index *MAY* provide better performance for large
> directory list lookups, but I've never tested it.  It requires Linux 2.6 for
> starters for the kernel-side stuff to actually support it properly. 
> grepping the linux 2.4 source shows no mention of hashing b-trees or
> dir_index options for ext[23].
> 
> This is a RECENT addition to ext3, and I don't think the support actually
> exists within 2.4 yet.  I've seen mention of "special backported patches"
> but this smells scarier to me than using filesystems which have been
> seamlessly integrated for over a year or so now.
> 
> So in terms of viable performance-driven alternatives, I see it being
> reiserfs, xfs, or jfs.
> 
> vfat/dos isn't faster, even with case insensitive semantics, for directory
> sizes of 20,000 or more.
> 
> =MB=
>