[Samba] Questions about file system support in Samba

[Craig White]

On Sat, 2006-02-04 at 12:00 -0500, Hibbard Smith wrote:
> I'm a relative newcomer to Samba, but very experienced with computers and
> linux.  I'm attempting to build a file/backup server for a small shop.  I'm
> using Fedora core 4 and samba on a system with a 2.1 TB RAID 50 array
> formatted as 1 very large xfs partition.  I want to share directories
> (folders) within the partition with a few Windows XP-Pro SP2 systems which
> are our primary work-stations.  Currently I'm running samba-3.0.21b.  I
> started with the 3.0.14 that was released with FC4, but upgraded to the
> "latest and greatest" when I couldn't make the original work correctly. The
> kernel has also been upgraded to the Fedora released 2.6.14.1-1656-FC4-SMP.
> 
>  
> 
> Our business is primarily imaging and video.  A large percentage of our
> files are over 2 GB with some way over that.  Therefore, the only way this
> could be useful is with very large shared file systems.
> 
>  
> 
> Here are the issues and my questions:
> 
>  
> 
> When I try to share this large partition (2.1 TB xfs) and use smbclient to
> access it, the log records an error which states that "the share doesn't
> exist or can't be accessed The error was access denied". I've made the share
> mode 0777 just to make sure permissions wouldn't get in the way.  If I move
> the share to an ext3 file system that's smaller than 2 GB it works
> correctly.  Any file system over 2 GB or any size xfs file system produces
> the error.  I haven't even tried to access the shares from a Windows system
> yet, I'm just using smbclient on the Fedora system.  I'm pretty sure I've
> got the config and permissions right because just changing the share to an
> ext3 file system under 2 GB works fine.  
> 
>  
> 
> So, here's my question(s):  
> 
>  
> 
> 1)       Does samba work with xfs file systems?
> 
>  
> 
> 2)       Does samba work with large file systems (2 GB +)?
> 
>  
> 
> 3)       If the answer to the above is yes, what might I be doing wrong?
> 
>  
> 
> I haven't been able to find limits documented anywhere.  However, I see a
> great deal of discussion on the web about files over 2 GB along with
> suggestions that they work fine.  This would imply that file systems of over
> 2 GB must work okay.  I've also seen much discussion which would suggest
> that xfs works fine also.  All this discussion seems to indicate that I've
> got something wrong.  I'm just not sure what it is or how to proceed.  I
> have turned samba debugging up and the logs show that the correct user/group
> is being used and that case is working okay. So, I'm really confused and I
> sure would appreciate any help.  I really need to get this done and I don't
> like the alternative (Windows Server 2003).
> 
----
I don't use smbclient much at all but am of the belief that smbclient
application would use an smbfs type mount and my understanding is that
an smbfs mount would error on files > 2Gb whereas the cifs mount would
not.

samba should have no problems with filesystem of that size.

Craig