[Samba] Re: How does the UNIX end work?

Andrew Edmondson your-copy at uk2.net
Mon Feb 7 12:17:57 GMT 2005


> Andrew Edmondson [your-copy at uk2.net] wrote:
>>
>> I've been trying to find something on this in the docs but have failed
>> so
>> far - perhaps I'm just looking in the wrong place and if so please feel
>> free to reply with a link.
>>
>> My issue is that files create on a samba share in windows are fine. The
>> file is created and is accessible by everyone straight away.
>>
>> But, if I have a unix script create a file on the samba share at the
>> server end it seems to take some time (varies up to a minute) to become
>> available to the windows clients.
>
> The question is: how does Windows work ? ;-)))
>
> And the answer - it caches. The view of the underlying drive is
> cached on the Windows side and it takes a few seconds it notices a
> change.
>
>> This has led me to think that there is a list of files which is updated
>> either at the request of smbd (due to access by a windows machine) or
>> after a periodic (every 1 minute?) scan of the files at the UNIX end. Is
>> there a way to shrink or remove this refresh time at all?
>
> I don't think so.
>

Figured this out in the end - it was a combination of 2 things. One, I had
the files on one server and [nfs] mounted to the box running samba which
then served the files out to the windows network. This introduced a delay
of about 20 seconds so I had to move some data to the server running
samba. The second thing was the  'change notify timeout'  needed to be
changed from its default 60 seconds.  Works great now, cheers for the
input Michal.


> --
> Michal Kurowski
> <mkur at gazeta.pl>
>
>



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