[Samba] Problems running samba in vmware

[Wes Deviers]

I had a similar problem using a machine running 3 VMs on a Linux host 
(Debian).  I don't know what was actually wrong, but switching to a 
non-onboard NIC helped considerably.  My working theory was that the 
combination of a crappy onboard chipset + promiscuous operation + VMWare 
Magic was causing it to drop packets, or generate too many interrupts, 
or something.  As is always the case, I didn't have enough time to 
properly debug it, just fix it.

Another theory I had, totally unsubstantiated but possible, was samba & 
network interaction with the VMWare clock skewing problem under Linux 2.6. 

I'd try putting a high-quality NIC on the machine and see what happens.  
Another thing you might try is loading up the VMWare drive in VirtualBox 
and setting it up that way.  VirtualBox uses Linux bridging instead of 
VMWare Magic, and I've seen it fix some things that VMWare didn't handle 
nicely.

Wes


On 03/06/2008 04:56 PM, Adam Zimmer wrote:
> I have now removed those socket options. I am running Linux 2.6.22.
>
> However, the delays persist. Any other ideas? I thought it might be 
> name resolution so I tried:
> name resolve order = wins host bcast
>
> But this hasn't helped either.
>
> Adam Zimmer
> President
> Arius Software Corporation
> (519) 885-9045 x122
>
>
>
> Charles Marcus wrote:
>> On 3/6/2008, Adam Zimmer (adam at ariussoftware.com) wrote:
>>> 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. 
>>
>> I'm not saying this is cauing  your problem, but you shouldn't be 
>> setting these at all, as long as you have a modern kernel (2.6 
>> series)...
>>
>> These haven't been needed for a long time.
>>