samba - Feb 2011 - Running and testing SMB2 under RHEL 5 and RHEL 6

Good morning, folks.

I've been driving myself to distraction trying to test out SMB2
performance under Linux. I see that the Samba on RHEL 5 is relatively
old, I'm dealing with an upstream NetApp fileserver that is configured
for SMB2, so I've got clients to test.

The Samba on RHEL 5 is relatively old, 3.0.33, with samba3x-3.5.4
alternatively available, and cifs-utils-* available from RPMforge.
I've done some testing with all of these nad not seen a significant
performance difference simply reading or writing up to 10,000 files  1
MB files in one directory, nor in other test setups, between when the
NetApp has SMB2 enabled or disabled. It certainly has *equivalent*
functionality with SMB2 enabled or disabled on the server side, but
I'm not seeing any difference on the side of the clients.

I also see that RHEL 6 has cifs-utils-4.4, and samba-3.5.4, and a
samba4 package I've not touched. I've done basic tests, but not seen
noticeable differences there, but my testing there is *very* limited:
I don't have test servers close enough to the NetApp to really really
on performance tests not to be blocked by busy VPN's between them.

Does RHEL 5 or RHEL 6, or the current versions of cifs-utils available
for either, actually support SMB2? I don't see a "mount.smb2"
binary
in the packages, though I see it mentioned in the docs, and I'd like
to really hammer the SMB2 server for performance comparisons. But it's
meaningless if if it's not actually mounting as SMB2.

On Sat, 19 Feb 2011 19:04:35 -0500
Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel at gmail.com> wrote:
> Does RHEL 5 or RHEL 6, or the current versions of cifs-utils available
> for either, actually support SMB2? I don't see a "mount.smb2"
binary
> in the packages, though I see it mentioned in the docs, and I'd like
> to really hammer the SMB2 server for performance comparisons. But it's
> meaningless if if it's not actually mounting as SMB2.
smb2fs is still under development upstream and neither RHEL5 or 6
include client-side support in the kernel. I'm not clear on whether
server-side support is being shipped in either though (the folks that
maintain that piece would need to comment).

-- 
Jeff Layton <jlayton at redhat.com>