Re: Strange Samba problem

[Chuck Swiger <cswiger%mac.com@localhost>]

Hi, Lars--

On Jan 9, 2008, at 7:12 AM, Lars Friend wrote:
> Has anybody else seen this?  The link included in the error message  
> tells me I ought to trace through it with GDB and see what gives,  
> but before doing that, I want to be sure I'm not reinventing the  
> wheel...
>
> An additional possible detail, all of the directories that are  
> served out by Samba are remote, and mounted as needed via nfs by amd.


This same issue arose in another list just a day ago [1], so I'll  
excerpt the relevant part of the thread:

> > > You really don't want to export a filesystem which itself is being  
> > > mounted remotely.  If you want to also provide SMB filesharing for  
> > > these files, run Samba on the [NFS server] and not on an NFS client.
> >
> > Knowing all the drawbacks including reduced bandwidth, there are  
> > some important organizational reasons, thus I want to do so.   
> > Moreover, Samba is just one application on the NFS clients,  
> > although an important one.
>
> While I certainly wish you the best of luck, previous experience  
> suggests that the drawbacks to this approach include not functioning  
> properly.
>
> NFS is a stateless protocol, except insofar as rpc.lockd in theory  
> provides lockf/flock style locking over the network-- yet Samba/CIFS  
> wants to allow extensive use of client side opportunistic locking,  
> which means that Samba really, really wants to run off of a local  
> filesystem.

Konrad reported that using "fake oplocks = yes" in the Samba config  
does improve the stability of this sort of configuration significantly.

Regards,
--
-Chuck

[1]: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2008-January/165869.html 
; part of the above is quoted from Konrad Heuer <kheuer2%gwdg.de@localhost>.