[Samba] Distributed Setup Suggestions

Bill Baird billbaird3 at gmail.com
Thu Jul 10 06:10:40 GMT 2008


My company is approx 200 users. We have 10 offices each with 5-30 users
each. A few offices work independently, but there has been a lot more
inter-office work lately. I am looking for a way to provide fast local
access to files stored in the same office as the user, but also acceptable
performance for inter-office file transfers.

We are currently using Oracle Drive for a central file server, it utilizes
WebDAV and has good performance over the WAN. There are samba & adaptec snap
servers for local file access, but these are currently only accessible when
in the same office as the local server.

- I have done a lot of research and demoing of OpenAFS (even went to their
conference last month!). While it is a true distributed filesystem; it is
very complex to setup, requires client software, requires a kerberos server
and seems to have a lot of quirks of its own. I don't think I am ready to
trust that...

- I have been trying to figure out a way to have Samba servers in each
office that would mount remote servers/folders via NFS. This would provide
access from the local server with hopefully better speeds for remote files
(NFS is my experience has been much faster over WAN links). But I'm not sure
how file locking will work. From searching, it seems that samba/nfs locking
isn't reliable. What is the current status of this? I also saw in Samba 3.2,
the CTDB project is becoming more mature. Would this be a possibility? Or is
that really only for clusters on a fast local network?

- There is MS DFS, but we really don't want to implement MS servers.

- ??

I have been searching and searching, but haven't found anything that would
solve our problem...so I'm hoping someone can help! Any suggestions would be
greatly appreciated. Thank you!

--Bill


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