[Samba] Samba locking with NFS backend.

[Greg Byshenk]

On Mon, Jan 07, 2008 at 10:38:30PM +0100, Jan Hugo Prins wrote:
 
> I'm in a bit of a loss at the moment.
> We have the following situation, we are running Samba for a lot of small 
> companies that need fileservices for there Windows Terminal Servers that 
> they use through a thin client on a Fiber / Lan extention to our datacentre.
> We have this samba running on 2 linux hosts (Fedora Core 5 and Fedora 7) 
> with a ldap backend for all the domains.
> This works ok, except for 1 thing.
> In the past we synced server1 to server2 every hour and when there was a 
> problems with a server, the users would only loose 1 hour of work at 
> most and server 2 would take over all configurations. So far so good, 
> when there are not too much customers.
> But we have had some growth recently and we added a central NFS server 
> to our setup. This server (Isilon IQ9000) is fully redundant so in 
> theory we could put any number of Samba frontend servers in front of it, 
> and we don't have to sync anymore.
> But now the problem, when we put the user data on the NFS backend, users 
> are complaining that they are not able to edit documents in Word because 
> they get a error that they can only open the file readonly. Excell the 
> same problem. But copying a file for example works ok. In general you 
> can divide the applications in 2 groups, 1 only readonly access to the 
> data, and 1 no problem.

[...]
 
> Is this a known issue with a sollution, or have I fould a problem here 
> without a current sollution?

I'm no Samba or Linux kernel expert, but in my experience, re-exporting
is almost always a bad idea.

I could be mistaken, but it strikes me that the best solution, if you have
something like the Isilon system, would be to use the Isilon's own CIFS
capabilities. What is the gain from exporting from the Isilon via NFS and
then trying to re-export using a separate Samba server?


-- 
greg byshenk  -  gbyshenk at byshenk.net  -  Leiden, NL