[Samba] Samba and ZFS

[Gaiseric Vandal]

Solaris 10 includes samba 3.0.x with zfs support.   Sun backported zfs 
modules from newer sun releases.    If you were to download samba from 
www.samba.org you would have to go with 3.4 or 3.5 for the zfs module.  
In the short term, assuming you don't have Vista or Windows 7 clients 
and aren't doing domain trusts the Sun bundled version of Samba should 
meet your needs.

I did have some issues when switching from UFS to ZFS.  ZFS ACL model is 
a lot more in line with Windows than UFS ACL's were.   With UFS,  it 
looked like potential mismatches between Windows and UFS acl's were 
ignored.  With ZFS, you are more likely to run into permissions being 
enforced inappropriately-  especially with MS Office documents.    There 
are various posts in this forum on Solaris 10 (some from me) that 
address this.

You may want to set samba share parameters to include

        vfs objects = zfsacl
        nfs4: mode = special
         nfs4:acedup = merge
         nfs4:chown = yes
         zfsacl: acesort = dontcare


You may also need to set  ZFS permissions to allow the user to 
read/write the following

a = read_attributes
R = read_xattr (exended attibutes)
c = read_acl



Although you can also set permissions via windows.    You also want to 
make sure that setting a file under solaris with  e.g. "660" (ie. user 
and group can read and write but no one else can ) doesn't end up being 
interpreted by windows clients as "deny access to everyone even despite 
rights granted to user or group."




I don't actually do quota checking in Windows.   Free space info seems 
OK.  But I have several servers with autofs and symlinks under the samba 
shared directories so I don't always expect samba directory info to be 
correct.    So this may be a cop out but you may need to setup a test 
machine to verify for yourself.


There are a lot of features in ZFS that are big improvements over 
UFS.    Especially if you have RAID5 volumes-  those are really easy to 
destroy in UFS if you loose your raid configuration info on the server.







On 08/04/2010 05:54 AM, Martin Rootes wrote:
> Hi,
>
>    I've recently moved our student fileserver from a Solaris 10 server 
> that was using UFS filesytems to a new Sun Cluster. As part of the 
> move I decided to employ ZFS for the filesystem so that I could take 
> advantage of some of ZFS's features. However, it now seems that 
> windows does not report the amount of space that the user is actually 
> using, or the amount of quota left, instead it reports the total 
> amount of space in use and free on the total filesystem. I'm currently 
> running and exceptionally old version of Samba (<3 !) and have been 
> planning to upgrade to the latest version of 3 prior to the start of 
> term. However, I'm concerned that this may be an inherant issue with 
> Samba and ZFS. Will any of the latest versions of Samba correctly 
> report a users usage and free space based on their quota or am I going 
> to have to look at moving all the data back to UFS to get quota 
> reporting working again?
>
>    Martin.
>