[Samba] Horrible Linux/Samba vs Windows political battle - can you help?

[Leon Brooks]

On Tuesday 20 September 2005 07:49, Gregory A. Cain wrote:
> If there is anyone reading this who works in the field of
> architecture or engineering, and with CAD or BIM software, who is
> using Linux as your server software, I would sure be appreciative it
> if you could write a testimonial for me to help me convince my boss
> that migrating from Linux to MS would be a horrible mistake.

I have a _customer_ who does CAD work and steel fabrication in a 
northern suburb of Perth, Western Australia. Needess to say, running 
their office from the same wires as arc welders and rail cranes doesn't 
do wonders for reliability, to say nothing of having steel fines 
contantly blowing through into the office, and the computers therein.

They use SaMBa for their file server (everything-server, as it does 
email and other stuff as well) and have never had a problem with it.

I have another client whose problems I posted about a few days ago. 
Their SaMBa server shoves data at over 9MB/s over a 100Mb/s LAN, 
roughly 2.5x faster than a Windows 2k3 box doing the same thing.

For those who feel the urge to make constructive suggestions about the 
problem I posted, Windows 2000 clients behave the same way, that is, 
file I/O through Windows Explorer or smbclient roars through, but 
running an app off the server is agony (an absurd number of 512-byte 
and 40-byte SMB requests, almost all of them on the EXE file).

I've used regedit to explain to an XP client machine that it really, 
really needs to cache and use OpLocks, to no obvious effect. I've 
switched on (and off) everything related in SaMBa, marked files and 
shares read-only and so on, likewise without obvious effect.

Cheers; Leon

-- 
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