samba - Feb 2005 - Windows share "bridge"

Hi,

I'm currently working on something quite ugly. We have a WindowsXP Home 
system here that is used as a storage server. Windows XP Home restricts 
the maximal user count to 5 users at a time that can connect to the 
network share. My boss doesn't want to delete winblows because he feels 
confident with it (except from the limitation) so a native samba server 
isn't possible. A dualboot is also not possible (been there) because 
write access for NTFS is very badly supported as we all know (tried 
captive; worked but has problems with large files and is very very slow).
So I thought about it and an idea came to my mind: a samba "bridge" -
a
seperate machine that connects to the windows xp home machine, mounts 
the shares and serves them itself to the rest of the network. I made a 
little picture...


--------------------            -----------------------                 
-------------
|                  |            |                     |                 
|           |
|   WinXP Home     |            | Gentoo Samba server |                 
|  random   |
|  (5 User max)    |            |                     |                 
|  client   |
|                  |            |                     |   -----------   
|           |
|  network share   |            |                 NIC-|---| Network 
|---|-NIC       |
|                  |    cross   |                     |   -----------   
|           |
|              NIC-|------------|-NIC                 |                 
|           |
|                  |   connect  |                     |                 
|           |
--------------------            -----------------------                 
-------------


I think the idea is kinda neat because we don't have to change anything 
on the windows side so my boss will be fine. I set the machine up - 
everything went very smoothly. It works actually quite fine right now. 
The only thing that bothers me is that it's very slow. Of course I 
suspected it would be not as fast as without the "bridge" but:

Data transfer without bridge: ~68Mbit/s
Data transfer with bridge: ~23Mbit/s
Data transfer with bridge not using samba but ftp to serve the share: 
~38Mbit/s
Data transfer was unchanged when applying some samba tweaks suggested by 
this book: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/chapter/book/appb.pdf. 
Though I guess it's somewhat outdated.
The NICs are 100Mbit cards.

I definetly want to get that faster. The Gentoo Samba server machine 
(called it wormhole, hihi) is some neat old p2@400Mhz with 64MB of 
SDRam. More memory doesn't help a bit and overclocking the CPU (tried 
some +50Mhz) doesn't help either. I suspect its some software problem 
and mainly memory bandwith/latency.
Has anybody any idea how I could make the bridge perform better?

Some additional information:
I'm mounting the Windows share on the samba box via some simple 
"smbmount //ip/dir /mnt/dir"
And I share it on the gentoo box to the rest of the network via this 
smb.conf:

---- snip
[global]
workgroup = GG
netbios name = wormhole
server string = Samba Server %v
security = share
hosts allow = 192.129.37.
load printers = no
log level = 0
socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192 IPTOS_LOWDELAY
read raw = yes
write raw = yes
max xmit = 65535
[gloin_e]
comment = Data
path = /mnt/test
read only = No
guest ok = Yes
--- snip

Running Linux version 2.6.10-gentoo-r6.


Thanks in advance


Sebastian Schaetz

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| Hi,
| I'm currently working on something quite ugly. We have a WindowsXP Home
...
| little picture...

Wow, that is kinda neat, but what are you sharing?  There might be other
things that can be done that would perform better.


Jim C.
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On Wednesday 16 February 2005 06:27, Sebastian Schaetz
wrote:
>  a samba "bridge" - a
> seperate machine that connects to the windows xp home machine, mounts
> the shares and serves them itself to the rest of the network. I made a
> little picture...
A fun hack, but I don't understand what your boss gains by this.  If you set
up samba as the server, upgrade his computer to XP Professional,  and 
configure his computer as a domain client, nothing really needs change for 
him except that shared files live in a different place (i.e., on the server).  
This can be obfuscated with the judicious use of shortcuts and/or folder 
redirection 
 http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-Guide/happy.html#redirfold

Is it that he wants to control who can access which shares? That's what he
has
you for. ;-)

If you want to improve your bridge, I think you have two things to try--- NIC 
and Disk.

Install gigabit nics for your workstation-to-samba bridge?

Set up IEEE1394 networking instead?  That's 400 MBPS if you can get Linux to
cooperate...
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/moviemaker/expert/bridgman_02march25.mspx

Upgrade disks (and/or  invest hardware RAID 0) to get fastest possible disk 
throughput?

Or consider getting rid of the samba server and simply upgrading your XP Home 
to Windows XP Professional (10 clients maximum).