Hello, and a question

Ray Simard
Mon, 30 Oct 2000 09:11:27 -0000

Hello from a newcomer!

So far I haven't been able to find any info on this problem;
perhaps someone can help.

The company involved has offices and networks in San Diego and
Los Angeles. The networks are interconnected by an IPSEC
tunnel implemented on Linux machines at either end. A machine
in the San Diego office is set up as WINS server and also has
domain master, preferred master and local master all set to
yes, and os level at 65, so it should pretty much run things,
and all that seems to be working.

The smaller office in Los Angeles has several Windows
machines, one of which runs an application which runs
continuously and unattended, and writes to an output file at
regular intervals. When the IPSEC connection was set up, the
output file was in a shared folder on a machine in San Diego,
and that folder was mapped to a drive letter on the Los
Angeles machine.

Unfortunately, the application seems to be quite fussy about
its writes, and if anything happens that it doesn't like, it
simply aborts. We haven't been able to make sure what exactly
is causing these aborts, but it seems that simply having some
net congestion which delays the ability to write to the file
over the tunnel can cause it to die.

What would be ideal would be some sort of caching proxy
running on the Linux boxes that would coopererate with Samba
(or even be part of it) to allow the Los Angeles machine to
map to a share on the local Linux box, thereby avoiding any
problems resulting from Internet slowness or temporary
interruptions of the IPSEC system. The proxy would then pass
the data to the share in San Diego, buffering it and retrying
as necessary. The destination Windows machine would
correspondingly map to a share on the SD Samba box. Even
better would be a clever proxy that would do buffering of this
sort, but would also somehow forward the shares on the San
Diego machines so that the drive mappings would appear to be
directly so San Diego.

Has anyone else run into this kind of situation, and is there
a solution?

TIA
Ray Simard
ray@sylvan-glade.com