[Samba] smb.conf for around 2500 users

[Jonathan Buzzard]

On Wed, 2012-07-04 at 17:11 +0200, steve wrote:

[SNIP]

> >
> > As to suggestions to use autofs on 2500 users, my advice is don't. Works
> > well at ~50 users but gets flacky at couple hundred users with random
> > things not working 100% of the time that will take you for ever to track
> > down to autofs if you do.
> >
> That's interesting/worrying. Although we have 2500 users, we only have 
> around 150 computers in the domain, spread over 4 teaching labs. Those 
> are split about 50:50 Linux:windows so I'd put the maximum number of NFS 
> autofs mounts to be 80 at most. What do you recon?
> 

What I found after a considerable period of digging is that very
occasionally the LDAP server would take to long to respond with the
automounter map and it would then silently fail. It would then have
cached that lookup as failed, but be fine looking up the next different
map. The initial symptom was individual users being unable to mount
their home directories, but it would then go away some time later.

At this point depending on your setup all sorts of nasty things can
happen. Note that our LDAP servers where massively over specified, but
every now and then it would take just too long for unknown reasons.

There appeared to be no way of changing the timeout in the automounter
other than changing the source and recompiling, which is disgusting to
say the least.

Also in my experience using automounted home directories rather than
going directly to the source causes Samba to loose the quota information
and report "wrong" disk sizes which is a pain.

The result of this is that we have been removing the automounter from
the equation.



JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                 Email: jonathan (at) buzzard.me.uk
Fife, United Kingdom.