[Samba] Problems running samba in vmware

Adam Zimmer adam at ariussoftware.com
Thu Mar 6 21:13:14 GMT 2008


I have used samba for nearly 9 years with no problems and we have about 
20 users. In the past we have had a dedicated samba server. We have 
recently virtualized this server to a quad core Q6600 using vmware 
virtual server 1.0.4 on a 64 bit host running ubuntu 7.10.

As part of the virtualization I installed samba 3.0.26a in ubuntu 7.10. 
Since this has happened users have complained about random delays. The 
machine itself is not using much CPU or memory. When I ssh and run top 
there is very little CPU utilization. I increased it from 1 to 2 cpus 
with no difference observed.

I have noticed to things in the logs of interest:
[2008/03/06 12:20:10, 0] lib/util_sock.c:write_data(562)   write_data: 
write failure in writing to client x.x.x.x. Error Broken pipe
[2008/03/06 12:20:10, 0] lib/util_sock.c:send_smb(769)   Error writing 
64 bytes to client. -1. (Broken pipe)

Also
[2008/03/06 14:29:57, 1] smbd/service.c:close_cnum(1230)   yyyy 
(x.x.x.x) closed connection to service zzzz

I noticed that when I run nbtstat on the client machine the net bios 
name has expired and it seems to take a while to find it again. I have 
samba configured as a WINS server.

I disabled oplocks on this particular share but the error still occurs. 
I have also disabled level 2 oplocks and kernel oplocks.

I have tried keep alive = 0, keep alive = 30, keep alive = 180 which 
seems to help a little bit with the delays.

I have tried various socket options including SO_RCVBUF=8192, 
SO_SNDBUF=8192, IPTOS_LOWDELAY, TCP_NODELAY, SO_KEEPALIVE. At the moment 
I have set SO_RCVBUF and SO_SNDBUF to be equal to 1400 as I noticed the 
MTU of the network card was 1500 which seems to but down on the broken 
pipes.

The server has a GB onboard network card and the clients mostly are GB 
network cards but some of them passthrough IP phones which are 100MB.

At any time when the delay (up to 60 s) occurs I can ssh into the samba 
server instantly using its dns name.

Aside from random delays the setup seems to work fine.

-- 
Adam Zimmer
President
Arius Software Corporation
(519) 885-9045 x122



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