[Samba] Is it possible to use Samba as a proxy and cache for a slow CIFS drive ?

[Martin Gilly]

Hi Volker,

thx for your answer !

I've been talking to a setup of WAN-Accell/WAFS vendors (Expand, Riverbed, Certeon, BlusCoat) in the last weeks but their strategies do not work in my setup because they never store-and-forward but rather stay synchronous with the backend and optimize the WAN-CIFS traffic and this is not of help for me as this optimization does not yield any benefits on the LAN and staying in sync with the backend keeps the bad performance :-/ 

With Alfresco, I was not able to acceive and progess - they tend to just not answer anymore once you tell tell you did the basic tuning they recommend and still have issues :-(

Doing things in two tiers looks like a good approach; but before putting together something completely new I'm trying to see if this problem has already been looked at. For Samba, I believe there was the plan once to implement something like a cifs proxy but it does not seem like this every reached a mature state ...

kr, 
martin

----- Original Message -----
From: Volker Lendecke
[mailto:Volker.Lendecke at SerNet.DE]
To: Martin Gilly
[mailto:mg at metamagix.net]
Cc: samba at lists.samba.org
Sent: Mon, 28 Mar 2011
23:13:07 +0200
Subject: Re: [Samba] Is it possible to use Samba as a proxy
and cache for a slow CIFS drive ?


> On Mon, Mar 28, 2011 at 02:38:17PM +0200, Martin Gilly wrote:
> > what will the proxy be able to do without a caching function ? Can I
> > mitigate the slow performance of the share with Samba as a proxy or
> > is there a way to "attach" a cache to it ?
> > 
> > How could a custom VFS module be setup ? Do you know someone who
> > could do this for me ?
> 
> In general, I think what you're trying to achieve is very,
> very difficult to do correctly. You can spend big bucks on
> the WAN accellerators around, they serve a very similar
> purpose. It would probably be better to approach Alfresco to
> speed up their implementation to fit your expectations. Or
> maybe just re-architect your system so that the bulk traffic
> can be sort-of precomputed and put on a different server?
> 
> With best regards,
> 
> Volker
> 
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