[Samba] lilesystem size limit samba on 64bit 2.6 kernel vs. clients win2k/winxp ?

[James Peach]

On 2/14/06, Michael Will <mwill at penguincomputing.com> wrote:
> I had an incredibly hard time finding any documentation on filesystem size
> limits for samba on 64bit linux with 2.6 kernel exporting to 32bit windows 2003
> and windows-xp by googling.
>
> The closest I could get to was that cifs filesystem size correlates to ntfs
> filesystem size and therefore there would be a 64TB limit. Are there additional
> limits within the software stack that I should be aware of?

Possibly. I've exported a virtual 1PB filesystem to windows clients and they
appeared to handle it ok.

> We are considering exporting a 40TB xfs filesystem striped over 20 2TB luns on a
> fibre channel SAN via LVM2 on SLES9-SP3, and will be falling back to 16TB
> filesystems if necessary. Anything below that would be cumbersome because of the
> amount of mountpoints.

XFS will handle this just fine. Be aware that xfs_repair may take a fair
amount of time and memory on very large filesystems. IIRC there was some
scaling work done recently, but I'm not sure if it made SP3.

> Can the 32bit windows clients keep up with that size as long as the files on the
> filesystem are not larger than 4GB?

I've never seen modern windows clients have problems with large files of
filesystems. I don't expect you will have problems.

--
James Peach | jorgar at gmail.com