err are you asking for help, or just wasting our time? sounds like you have a big job ahead of you tonight setting up that NT machine better get that out of the way before telling us your life story like that....
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chris de Vidal" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, October 23, 2002 4:13 PM Subject: [Samba] How Samba let us down > Before you read this, I want to state (for reasons > listed below) that I don't expect an answer (advice is > welcomed, but please read this email carefully before > answering). I'm sharing this with the community with > the hope that better software results from our sad > experience... > > BACKGROUND > > I've been using NT for 4 years, Netware and Linux for > 3 years, and Samba for almost 2. I work in the IT > department of a medium-sized unit of a global > advertising company. We have a Netware and NT > environment with a bit of Linux. > > We installed a 280GB IDE Samba archive server (rare > usage) and a 15GB SCSI Mac/Samba file server (medium > usage). We also use Samba for more menial tasks like > smbmounts and file transfers. We thought we were > comfortable with Samba. We knew we were comfortable > with other types of file servers. > > OUR SETUP > > Going from my tired memory: > Athlon MP 1.8GHz (mem=nopentium) > 2GB ECC SDRAM > Tyan S2460(I think?) > Antec 450W PS > Lots of cooling > 5 IBM DeskStar 120GB drives with 8MB caches in RAID 5 > 3ware 7580(I think?) 8-port hardware RAID > 3ware hot-swappable drive cages > Intel e1000 Gigabit NIC, full duplex, 1000MBit, > autonegotiation off > 3com Gigabit switch, autonegotiation off > RedHat 7.3 > Kernel 2.4.19 with ACL support > ext3 with ACL support > Samba 2.2.5 with ACL support installed from a > recompiled SRPM from the samba.org FTP site. > Winbind > NO nfs daemon (I hear it's buggy w/ ACLs) > > We have a variety of clients, from DOS and OS/2 to > Windows (9x-2000) and Linux. The server acts as a > print spooling area (the actual queues are on an NT > server) and scratch area for database programmers to > manipulate their flat database files. As far as I > know, these files are not commonly accessed by more > than one user at a time. > > THE PROBLEM > > For the past year, our heaviest-used Netware server > has been under more and more stress.. filling up, > running out of licenses, slowing down, etc. > Preliminary tests using Samba on a fast Linux box > showed anywhere from 70% to 1000% speed improvements, > depending on the task. The decision was made to > switch it to Linux; the whole company is migrating > away from Netware and we (as a unit, not speaking for > the company) don't want to be completely trapped into > Windows if we can help it. > > The new hardware arrived and more preliminary tests > indicated all looked good. We were set to switch last > Saturday night. We turned off logins to the Netware > box, backed it up, restored it to the new Linux box, > set permissions, then made sure the various computers > in the building could log in. > > Yesterday, our first day, was rough. For most of the > day we fought random slow browsing with no > explanation. Clients would appear to lock up for > several seconds. We found some misconfigurations in > smb.conf but the problems reappeared. No errors were > seen in any machines' logs on debug level 2. I > trimmed the smb.conf to a minimal number of options > and that seemed to help with the slowness. Today, > however, the problem reappeared a few times with no > errors in the logs that we could see. > > The printers were missing some of the records sent to > them to print, something that had never happened with > Netware. Every time the missing records were > different. Occasionally, it would work right. > Oplocks (kernel, level I and II) were left to defaults > (turned on). > > THE OUTCOME > > Sadly, tonight we are installing a Windows NT server. > Installing a brand new server is actually cheaper for > us than the 8 or so hours of downtime to back up the > server, install NT on it, and restore the data to it. > We don't want to revert to Netware because so many > clients have been reconfigured to log on only to the > domain (DOS, OS/2, etc.) and that would require many > more hours reversing those changes. Also, some files > have been added since leaving Netware. We also > decided to proceed to use NT because is more proven in > this capacity. > > CONCLUSION > > To be fair, the problems could be related to some > misconfiguration. I have pasted the smb.conf below. > > I fear it might just be an oplock problem, but it is > not clear what would result if more than one user > happened to try to write to a file with them disabled. > Every advice we found said to leave them on to > prevent corruption and to improve performance. We ran > out of time to test it, and feared what failure would > bring. Running this: > grep -r -B5 -A5 oplock /var/log/samba/ | grep -B5 -A5 > error > produced only 5 of these errors > oplock_break: receive_smb error (Connection reset by > peer) > from the same DOS machine from 2 days worth of all > machines' logs running at debuglevel 1 (some at level > 2). I don't know if that is a good indicator of an > oplock problem. I can do other greps on request. > > Unfortunately, we can't test out your suggestions in > production, and our off-production testing apparently > can't stress it well enough. So please just take this > email as input - I'm not looking for answers here, > though advice is appreciated. > > The problem could also have been environment or > hardware. We should know soon, as we are going to > reinstall the original Samba server with NT, and the > problems should reappear if hardware or environment. > If we do find that to be true, I will certainly reveal > our findings to this mailing list. > > And perhaps the problem was with ACLs. We couldn't > turn them off in production to test that theory. > > It is likely that we will try Samba in this capacity > again in the future with a more mature version. > > Thanks for listening, > /dev/idal > > > [global] > server string = > workgroup = <our domain> > password server = <our PDC> > security = domain > encrypt passwords = yes > smb passwd file = > /etc/samba/smbpasswd > veto files = /lost+found/ > winbind uid = 10000-20000 > winbind gid = 10000-20000 > winbind separator = + > create mask = 660 > force create mode = 660 > directory mask = 0770 > force directory mode = 0770 > log file = > /var/log/samba/%m.log > debuglevel = 2 > > [print] > path = /share/print > writeable = yes > > __________________________________________________ > Do you Yahoo!? > Y! Web Hosting - Let the expert host your web site > http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ > -- > To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the > instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba > -- To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the instructions: http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba