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

[Ken Barber]

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 Barber

On Tuesday 14 January 2003 11:52, Henrique Cesar Ulbrich wrote:
> Hi folks!
>
> I have a really really bad and weird problem here.
>
> In my company we have some 40 or 50 stations, divided in about 8 or 10
> workgroups. The network is "almost 100% pure Windows". I say almost because
> two machineas are not: the server itself (Slack + Samba 2.2.7) and my
> workstation, wich is a Red Hat 8.
>
> My machine is the ONLY Linux station in the whole network.
>
> All Windows clients (ranging from Win98 to WinXP - we have all versions!)
> connects and "surf" flawlessly across the net, throug their own shares and
> to the Samba server shares.
>
> My station, when running Windows XP, also works flawlessly.
>
> BUT my Linux station is a headache. I don't know what to do.
> Smbclient / smbmount is simply slooooooooooooooow on doing whatever I want
> on the network.
>
> A simple "ls" command in a mounted smb directory takes more that 20 MINUTES
> to accomplish.
>
> Mounting the shares does not take a second. But navigate through the
> mounted shares (and copying, deleting, moving, opening, etc...) takes,
> sometimes, 20, 30 or even 40 MINUTES to do something.
>
> None of the Windows clients has such a problem. Again, my machine, when
> running WinXP, does not have this problem. An it has the SAMENetbios name,
> same IP, same MAC (of course), the only thing that changes is the OS.
>
> I have this 170k GIF image file being copied from my neighbour's computer
> (right beside! same workgroup! same net segment!). Elapsed time 40 minutes
> and counting. And it is not over yet!!!  I know it is still retrieving
> because I'm controlling the image by the Konqueror image preview and the
> tcpdump output.
>
> I've never had this problem before with no distro, including previous Red
> Hats. I'm not saying it is a RH8 problem. I just don't know what it is, and
> what to do.
>
> In all companies I've worked before, I've alwais used Linux as my
> workstation and never had to worry about smbclient setup & troubleshoot.
> I just set up a mountscript with the shares I want and go fot it!
> It was always a trivial task.
>
> What do you suggest? Where is smbclient's netbios config stuff so I can
> have a look?
>
> I have already RTFM, read the man pages, the smbclient tips (unmantained
> for a long time), the "Using Samba" book (which says absolutely NOTHING
> useful about smbclients, besides testing the server...) and searched for
> answers all across the Net.
>
> I'm desperately crying. I'm advocaring for Linux here. I want to make a
> gradual migration of desktops here to Linux, but I NEED this working. You
> know, all bosses are MS-Oriented these days...
>
> Thanks in advance.

-- 
"The reasoning mind cannot work under any form of compulsion."
          -- Ayn Rand, "The Fountainhead"