[Samba] suggestions for a "fast" fileserver - 1G / 10G

[Sabuj Pattanayek]

>
>
> It may be slightly less safe than ext4 with all the slower options
> enabled (data journaling and the like). However for all practical
> purposes it's safe enough, it doesn't eat your data, even when pulling
> the plug (if you have BBUs...). I know it, because it happened on me
> this very morning on a 40 TB server running since 2008.
>

I lost a 37T XFS volume due to corruption after the system locked up and
had to be power cycled a year or two ago. Server was a Dell R515 with a
PERC H700 w/BBU 512MB (not 512MB NV model it looks like, so that increased
the chances of this happening) running Centos 6.3 or 6.4 at the time. I've
had to power cycle ext4 and jfs systems several times with the same cheaper
variant of the H700 card and have not had this happen. Make sure you have
backups if the data is important enough and always get a RAID card with
NVRAM and BBU if you're doing hardware raid.


>
> There have been a troubled period with XFS, but it was something like 8
> or 9 years ago (around the time SGI hit the ground). Didn't you notice
> RH ships XFS nowadays, and employs many of the maintainers and the
> project leader?
>

The newer 3+ kernels are probably more stable with XFS. I know RHEL
backports lots of stuff into the older 6 kernels, but using mainline stable
kernels wouldn't be a bad idea either.


> All of this is fine and dandy but drifts away from the OP concerns. I'd
> insist on the obvious: you can reach very high network performance even
> with Samba 3.x.x, given that the underlying filesystem responds really
> really fast to small requests. ext3/4 with the default options
> definitely won't cut it. Particularly not ext3 which has no real reason
> to be used anymore.
>

I really think he's somehow connecting with smbv1 protocol, since it only
happens with SMB and not other protocols he's tested and I got the exact
same rates he did when connecting with v1. If he's using samba v3.x.x it
looks like he may need to set :

max protocol = SMB2

..in the global section as explained here :

https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_3.6_Features_added/changed#SMB2_support