Re: Strange Samba problem

[Lars Friend <lfriend%mcci.com@localhost>]

Thanks Chuck,

        That is indeed an interesting concern.  Unfortunately (for 
the moment at least) we're stuck with the NFS -> SMB -> Win32_clients 
arrangement.  It appears, however, that there is something else going 
on.  I've got a couple of good leads.  The directory it is choking on 
has over 17000 files in it, and some of them have names upwards of 
100 chars, so I expect that it is some sort of a limit I'm running up 
against.

        If I find out anything useful, I'll post back to the list.

                -lars

At 12:54 PM 1/9/2008, Chuck Swiger wrote:

(snip)


> 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>.