[Samba] Question about Posix Locking and Windows XP/SP3 clients

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 05:06:21AM -0800, Volker Lendecke wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 07:48:19AM -0500, John_DeBella at notes.teradyne.com wrote:
> > 
> > Hi Volker,
> > 
> > Thanks for the response. To clarify, we are not re-exporting via NFS but
> > via Samba. We've run in this mode for several years, (samba server mounting
> > home dirs via automounter over NFS and sharing via Samba), without issues.
> > However, we had been running with much earlier releases of Samba on
> > Solaris, 2.2.7a. We just started seeing this behavior since upgrading to a
> > later version on RedHat about 2 weeks ago. Interestingly, when comparing
> > the options between the older version of Samba to the current we see that
> > "posix locking" is enabled on the older version. Was it not working in
> > older releases?
> > 
> > We're doing this mainly because we have multiple filers and having one
> > "server" for the users to access their home directories from is ideal.
> 
> You might try the latest Samba under Solaris. You did not
> only change Samba, you also changed the NFS client. This is
> in my experience the weakest component.
> 
> Volker

I imagine the OP'er may not have a CIFS license for their NetApp.  It
can be somewhat costly (though not as much as the NFS license!).

We also re-export NFS via CIFS on a Samba 3.0.33 server running under
Solaris 10.  I've run into similar issues to the OP[1], but we've
gotten things working as well as possible by disabling posix locking
for certain servers and disabling oplocks at the global level.

We still run into problems with some older NFS servers with buggy NLM
implementations and such, so our Samba server needs constant monitoring
and maybe once a month some manual intervention to clean up hung
processes.

Not ideal, but far easier than installing a CIFS server on many of
these older Unix servers.

Ray

[1] http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2007-August/134276.html