When the world was young, Adam Snodgrass carved some runes like
this:
> Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 19:06:07 -0400
> Subject: Failure to execute programs from a mapped drive letter on a samba
> I have a strange situation. I have a Linux machine running samba
> 1.9.18p8, serving a mix of NT Workstation 4.0 and Windows 95 clients. In
> general, things have worked flawlessly, with one exception: none of the
> clients are able to execute programs stored on these shares. Full reading
> and writing to the shares is possible; and even though I cannot see how it
> would be relevant, the execute bits are set to all files. I can provide
> needed portions of my smb.conf file as needed. Any suggestions or
> comments are most welcome.
It may have something to do with your TCP/IP settings on the client
machines (or maybe not :-), specifically RWIN. I don't have any NT
experience myself, but my win95 clients were barfing (both browsing
and launching even simple apps) at first, until I played with some
of the client settings. In the samba docs (Speed.txt, tuning
stuff) they talk about "slow" client problems relating to the
client settings for MTU, MSS, RWIN, etc. At first I didn't think
it related to my browsing problem (but I guess no performance at
all could be considered a performance problem, if you stretch it)
but it turned out that my clients (all clients have modems as our
only access to the outside world right now) which had been tweaked
for good DUN performance were not working with the samba stuff.
By good DUN performance, I mean the TCP/IP settings had been
added/set in the registry. Normally, win95 has no settings except
MTU=1500 (a default buried somewhere in the code) which is usually
okay for a LAN, however, it sucks for dialup stuff. If you want to
tweak your DUN settings, you need to add all the relevant
keys/values to that disaster-waiting-to-happen (otherwise known as
the windows registry). This is easily done, either by hand (if you
know where & what to do) or with a number of utilities (a good free
one is MTUSpeed):
http://www.mjs.u-net.com/mtuspeed.htm
and the settings, etc, are described at:
http://dspace.dial.pipex.com/mreeves/tips.htm
To make a long story even longer, you need to check whether the
RWIN value is set in the registry, and then try adjusting (either
up or down). RWIN=3072 appears to be the threshold value
(according to the slow client stuff in the samba docs). In my
case, the default settings were fine for DUN performance, but I had
to bump up RWIN to get samba working. Original settings:
MaxMTU=576
MSS=536 (MTU-40 bytes)
RWIN=4xMSS=2144
New samba-friendly settings:
RWIN=8xMSS=4288
Now, not only does browsing work fine, but simple win32 apps
installed on the share work fine too. I can't help you with more
bloated apps like M$ Orifice (noun: a mouth or vent opening into
which you toss time and dollars) but there are some tips in the
samba docs.
According to the slow client stuff mentioned in the docs, some
people had to lower RWIN below 3072 for good performance (while I
had to raise it above that value). It may be somewhat
hardware/speed dependent; I have fast clients (PII-266s) talking to
a slow server (486-100) so your mileage may vary.
Let me know if this helps at all.
Regards, Steve Arnold
****************************************************************
Stephen L. Arnold Systems Engineer
ENSCO Inc. email: arnold.steve@ensco.com
P.O. Box 5488 www: http://www.ensco.com
Vandenberg AFB, CA 93437 voice: 805.734.8232 x68838
fax: 805.734.4779
#include <std_disclaimer.h>
****************************************************************