[SOLUTION] Slow connection with smbclient (Windows in the same machine works fine!) - Sorry, message a little long...

[Ken Barber]

This is very interesting (see long and interesting saga below).  I'll be 
teaching Samba in my RedHat class this week, and we're using RH8 so we'll 
have a chance to test this in the lab.

I'll report back whatever I find out.

Ken Barber

On Monday 03 February 2003 08:50, Henrique Cesar Ulbrich wrote:
> > Historians believe that, in Tue 14 Jan 2003 18:30, Ken Barber said:
> > > If I were in your shoes my next step would be to fire up a packet
> > > sniffer (Ethereal for instance) and see what is coming and going on the
> > > wire.
>
> Ken and everybody here, I must apologise.
>
> I told you I have already sniffed my eth0, but I think I have made
> something wrong. There werre really odd things ocurring on the wire. When I
> realised what was wrong the solution came instantly.
>
> For those who dont remember the issue, a little explanation.
>
> Maybe you can remember it. I was having performance problems with my Red
> Hat 8 box in an all-Windows network. My station and the Samba 2.2.7 Server
> were the only two Linux machhines over the network. All Windows boxes were
> fast accessing the network, but my linux box was not. It took as long as 20
> minutes to accomplish a simple LS comand and more than one hour to transfer
> a 170 kB GIF file from a nearby machine.
>
> I had already sniffed my eth0 with ethereal and tcpdump, but could not
> extract from there any conclusions.
>
> After I wrote to the list (and Ken Barber kindly answered - thanks!) I
> decided to try again. Fired up an ethereal instance in WinXP and in Linux
> (both on my machine), made a copy of an 1Mb file to the net in both OSs and
> compared the logs.
>
> I dont know what I've done wrong, but this time the issue showed up. I've
> found out that my smbclient was rescanning the mounted volume (for
> directory information, file names, etc.) with a delta-time between them
> less than 1s (one second). Finding this out, solution is easy.
>
> You just have to mount your SMB volumes with the TTL option set. The
> Samba.org distribution default fot TTL is 1000 (which means one thousand
> milisseconds or 1s). BUT Red Hat's distribution of samba-clients have set
> this to less than a second (TTL=100 or even TTL=10). I dont know why and
> didn't bother to search for. I've heard that you can have a smbclient.conf
> (is it real?) with the default settings for all samba-client programs
> (smbmount, smbclient etc) but my system does not have such file.
>
> Anyway, with the command below
>
> smbmount //HOST/share /home/henrique/mnt/HOST/share/ -o
> username=henrique%pass, ... other options ... ,TTL=10000
>
> My problems were solved. I set up TTL to 10 seconds.
>
> Do you think this is a Red Hat problem? They shipped RH8 with Samba
> 2.2.7-2. Is this version known for this kind of bug? I looked for it on
> samba.org and didn't find any mention to it.
>
> Thanks everybody, and I hope my findings would help people with the same
> problems.
>
> Best regards

-- 
"The establishment of an American Soviet government will involve the 
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	- William Z. Foster, National Chairman of the Communist Party USA, 1932