samba - Mar 2005 - Optimise Samba for MYOB

First a short background of the situation,

My work ran a MYOB file from a MS 2000 server.  They were getting problems 
such as the,

"cannot send messages to so-and-so.  blah blah blah..."

They were planning to upgrade to MS 2003 in an attempt to eradicate all 
error messages and remove the lag sometimes experienced when opening a large 
list.

Since i am a linux fan i suggested giving samba 3.0.11 a try, i was 
convinced it would be an improvement.  After all Linux is the best right.

After installing samba 3.0.11 on fedora core 3 and getting everybody access 
to the MYOB file it is found that there are just as many or more of those 
error messages and the lag is as bad as ever.

Does anyone know of a way to optimise Samba to quicken access to the MYOB 
file and prevent those error messages.

Part of the smb.conf

[Shared]

        path = /home/shared
        writable = yes
        valid users = @office root
        force create mode = 666
        force create user = root
        force create group = office
        oplocks = false
        level2 oplocks = false


My boss is starting to get a bit impatient, even worse we will have to take 
on MS 2003 Server if the speed issues are not sorted out.

Thanks,

YC

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On Tue, 2005-03-01 at 07:30 +0000, Jackie Chan wrote:
> First a short background of the situation,
> 
> My work ran a MYOB file from a MS 2000 server.  They were getting problems 
> such as the,
> 
> "cannot send messages to so-and-so.  blah blah blah..."
> 
> They were planning to upgrade to MS 2003 in an attempt to eradicate all 
> error messages and remove the lag sometimes experienced when opening a
large
> list.
Is this a suggestion by MYOB's vendor, or just a hunch?
> Since i am a linux fan i suggested giving samba 3.0.11 a try, i was 
> convinced it would be an improvement.  After all Linux is the best right.
Samba emulates windows as closely as possible in areas of protocol
correctness, which in particular includes locking correctness.  While
Samba does allow more tweaks (in particular, it can deny oplocks on a
more granular basis) the locking behaviour (which is almost certainly to
blame for both MYOB issues this week) is identical.

The only thing I would suggest (which would be in common to both
systems) is to look very, very carefully at your network gear.  Most
reports of bad Samba performance are due to latency inflicted by poor
quality NICs and switches.  I have seen this on my network with other
locking-intensive applications.  

The money spent on Intel, or even Netgear FA-311 NICs, and *decent*
switches will be well worth it.  Ditch the RTL8139 cards as fast as you
can.  We have had good luck with the non-toy Dlink switches, and very
bad luck with anything cheaper.

Otherwise, as the performance problems are general to networked MYOB, I
suggest you instead chase the vendor.  

I realise everybody is in a rush, and it is coming up to tax time again
(at least for those who have Australian accountants :-), but as it
matches windows, I'm not sure we can help other than the oplock settings
you already use.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College  http://hawkerc.net
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