[Samba] Samba on opensolaris's ZFS

[Ed Plese]

On Tue, Feb 06, 2007 at 04:43:35PM +0100, Koen Smeets wrote:
> Does anybody have first-hand experience on running Samba off of Sun's ZFS? 
> I am specifically looking for compatibility between the two and performance 
> of the combo.

I haven't used it yet for any high load applications, but Samba runs just
fine on Solaris with ZFS.  Currently the main missing feature in Samba
with regards to ZFS is support for ZFS ACLs.  It will respect the ACLs
that are set from Solaris, but they can't be viewed or set from a Windows
client.  Work is currently underway to implement this feature though:

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba-technical/2007-January/051123.html

I can't speak much for performance since I haven't specifically tested that
aspect, but it seems at least on par with other filesystems.

> The reason I am looking into this is I find ZFS features of in snapshotting 
> etc. very attractive.

I found the snapshots quite attractive as well.  I wrote up a short page
on some fun things you can do with ZFS and Samba:

http://www.edplese.com/samba-with-zfs.html

The last item on the page is a VFS module I put together that makes
Samba's shadow copy features work very nicely with ZFS snapshots.
Consider the module "experimental" at the moment since I haven't
actually used it in production yet.


Ed Plese