I am running Samba 2.0.6 on HP-UX 10.20. I serve out print services sitewide to a couple of hundred printers. They are networked, jet direct connected. However, they show as local devices on the server (we implemented BSD printing on the HP ourselves). I have up to about 600 users utilizing this service. We use security set to server with an entry for everyone in the password file. The password server line points to our NT PDC's. They are running NT 4.0 with SP5 applied. I recently found that bringing up the print requestor from a windows application (Word, Outlook, you name it) can take a long time to display and 'freeze'. In fact it was taking anywhere from 5-25 seconds. People complained. I looked into the situation and made two changes as suggested from the mailing lists: 1) Change the LPQ command to cat out a file that echos "no entries" and 2) upgrade to 2.0.6. Neither of these made a difference. The one piece I haven't shared yet is what I found to be the most interesting. As I said, we use security set to server and point to our NT PDC's for authentication. In getting down to the packet level, I am seeing that the first connection sent to the NT box has the user name and all of the password set to 1F's. the negotiation results in an "access denied error 5" message. Here is where the delay can be verified. After this, the Samba server sends the username with the password and is authenticated. Any clue as to how I may get this delay time down? I think, from a users point of view, a 2 second delay is about all they'll except. I'm afraid...that my time....is....running.....out. -Tim Corcoran Siemens Power Corporation Tim_Corcoran@nfuel.com
Tim,> I recently found that bringing up the print requestor from a windows > application (Word, Outlook, you name it) can take a long time to display and > 'freeze'. In fact it was taking anywhere from 5-25 seconds. People > complained. I looked into the situation and made two changes as suggested > from the mailing lists: 1) Change the LPQ command to cat out a file that > echos "no entries" and 2) upgrade to 2.0.6. Neither of these made a > difference.If you are running a couple of hundred printers you must have a very large /etc/printcap file. This will be loaded in whenever smbd starts up if you are running it out of inetd. The other problem is that any browsing will be very slow too. What we did at here is to divide the printers up into seperate areas (floors, buildings whatever) and create a seperate "pseudo server name" for each. Then we created a seperate smb.conf snippet for each of the these pseudo server names. Then at the appropriate place in the main smb.conf file we put a line of the form:- include = <some-dir>/%L.conf The '%L' is replaced by the server name that the PC is calling this machine by, thus even though it is all the same *real* machine (same Ip address), they each get a subset of the printers appropriate to the pseudo server name, which is much faster to load. Then you can either register all the pseudo names into DNS/WINS manually or you can use a line in the main smb.conf file like:- netbios name = server1 netbios aliases = server2 server3 server4 This will register *all* these names with WINS or whatever. Then if you want to get really fancy you can have multiple print servers and just move these pseudo names between the servers as load dictates - very flexible. We run over 3000 printers on 150 servers on this basis. Damian -- Damian Ivereigh Cisco Systems, Australia damian@cisco.com +61 2 8448 7344 "Free your mind."
[Tim Corcoran]> We use security set to server with an entry for everyone in the > password file. The password server line points to our NT PDC's. > They are running NT 4.0 with SP5 applied.I seem to be telling everyone this ... but have you tried security = domain yet? Read DOMAIN_MEMBER.txt for details. This could speed things up. Peter