[Samba] Samba on top of NFS question

Ryan Taylor rtaylor82 at gmail.com
Mon Feb 27 20:11:06 GMT 2006


I am sorry for the long *involved* post, however we are at wits end and
advice would be greatly appreciated.

Background: We have three servers in this example.  Two of the servers (we
will call Server A & B) each have a 2.7T raid 5 array that is mirrored with
DRBD and monitored for failover with Heartbeat.  NFS is running and
exporting the array on Heartbeats virtual IP.
"Server C" mounts the export, and is a Samba PDC.  The mount contains all
project data which samba hands out to ~250 windows boxes.  There are at
least ~1600 files open(locked) at any given time throughout the day.  It
works, kinda.  The users can work and everything is fine except we get
somewhat random, usually 2 freezes a day.  The windows boxes freeze up for a
few minutes then resume working like nothing happened.  The servers go idle
during this "freeze", and sometimes we get the " lock.d can't reach server"
then "ok" messages in dmesg, but other times not.

The post is long enough without telling you all that we have tried. (long
list including network drivers, nfs mount options, samba locking options,
etc..).  We now have data on "Server C" and Samba hosting it off it's local
drives.. It's only been one day so far, but so far (knock on wood) no
freezes.  In addition samba runs much smoother on the clients end, such as
(*right-click*properties boxes etc...) Segue to question...

Question(s):  Does Samba not work on top of NFS? Is there any better way for
Samba to access the data on the failover pair of servers than NFS?  Is it
locking that is causing us problems? What is the correct 'Samba' way to get
remote data shared to multiple samba front ends?  I guess my ultimate
question and why I am posting, is because I have tried TONS of things and am
curious if anyone else has this particular setup working?

Please let me know if I can provide any information!

Thank you for your time,


--
Ryan Taylor
Micro Consultants
770-789-2072
rtaylor82 at gmail.com
"Until I see everything working right, I will be apprehensive."  Pamela
Klabbers


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