[Samba] Re: Sharing Problems: huge numbers of share

[henry j. mason]

Olivier Gaspard wrote:
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> Hi,
> 
> 	My name is Olivier Gaspard, and I work for the CHC Belgium (IT
> department of differents Hospitals).
> 
> 	So, let's me introduce the situation: for the moment, the firm works
> with Win NT for the users profiles, and Samba 3.0 on Unix platform for
> the "files sharing". Resuming : Every users having a user (NT) profile
> (roamming profile) and have a private directory on this Samba server.
> So, in many case, a lot of directories are created in addition to share
> documents between differents users. Time after time, sharing after
> sharing, we have for now more than three thousands sharing on the Samba
> server!! So, the problem (big for the firm) is that one: every night, we
> have to reboot the server because of saturation of the samba service. In
> addition, if we reload the samba.conf during the day (lot of
> transactions in use), the server crash (100% CPU).
> 
	can you post more details about your system? specifically:
	- operating system
	- kernel version (if appropriate)
	- number and speed of CPUs
	- quantity and speed of RAM
	- disk drive details (scsi, ATA, raid, etc.)
	- filesystem being used

> 	My question is that one: Which server(s)/samba(s) architecture we have
> to applicate for managing all of these sharing concurrently without any
> crash ;-)! Is it possible to replicate/duplicate/(other) the samba
> service for resolve the problem?
> 
	with the price of hardware these days, you need to throw
	hardware at the problem. also, you should consider using
	reiserFS or XFS for the filesystem your shares are on.

> 	How big enterprise do with managing their samba servers?
> => Which are the processus/installations to manage with samba lot of
> sharing? Is better to use samba on AIX or UNIX?

	i'd say AIX is a non-starter unless you have some very
	special reasons to use it. linux with the 2.6 kernel is
	very hard to match as a server operating system.

	also, you absolutely should be using hardware RAID and
	scsi, and i'd recommend an opteron based system. but that's
	just me, you could go more exotic (and expensive).

	regards,
	henry