samba - Apr 2002 - Windows 2000 Terminal Server and SAMBA

Hi,

We a re planning to migrate from the Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server to the
Windows 2000 version sometime within the next few weeks.  From the
newsgroups and have gathered that the MULIPLEUSERSONCONNECTION registry
option that allowed each connection from the Terminal Server to start a
separate smb process has been disabled in the 2000 version.  Is there any
work arounds that can be done in the current version of SAMBA (2.2.3a)?  If
not, are there any plans to add something for this in later versions?

Thanks in advance.

can you elaborate on this registry
why do u need a separete smbd process
we are running WTS on W2k with samba
what does this registry key do

my understandingis smbd runs as root and spawns different smbd process as
child processes

-----Original Message-----
From: Drew.Zeller@statcan.ca [mailto:Drew.Zeller@statcan.ca]
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 9:42 AM
To: samba@lists.samba.org
Subject: [Samba] Windows 2000 Terminal Server and SAMBA


Hi,

We a re planning to migrate from the Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server to the
Windows 2000 version sometime within the next few weeks.  From the
newsgroups and have gathered that the MULIPLEUSERSONCONNECTION registry
option that allowed each connection from the Terminal Server to start a
separate smb process has been disabled in the 2000 version.  Is there any
work arounds that can be done in the current version of SAMBA (2.2.3a)?  If
not, are there any plans to add something for this in later versions?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
instructions:  http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba

This registry value was added by Microsoft for the NT 4.0 version of WTS.
It's purpose was to over come the 2048 file limitation that was present
under the NT 4.0.  This registry value could be set to maintain a separate
virtual circuits  per terminal server user.  Under SAMBA this meant that a
separate smb process would be spawned per user from the same WTS server.
(You can refer to the Microsoft Q190162 on this).  From what I have
gathered, under Windows 2000, this registry value was disabled as Microsoft
has increased the open file limitation to 8192.

Without this option what will happen on the WTS server is that all user
connections from the WTS to a file server is made under one process (and in
the case of SAMBA only one smb process will spawned for all user connections
to a SAMBA file server from the same WTS server).  Based on my
understanding, the more file access you have going to the same file server
smb process, from the same WTS server, the worse your file network
performance will be.

-----Original Message-----
From: Javid Abdul-AJAVID1 [mailto:AJAVID1@motorola.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 11:16 AM
To: 'Drew.Zeller@statcan.ca'; samba@lists.samba.org
Subject: RE: [Samba] Windows 2000 Terminal Server and SAMBA


can you elaborate on this registry
why do u need a separete smbd process
we are running WTS on W2k with samba
what does this registry key do

my understandingis smbd runs as root and spawns different smbd process as
child processes

-----Original Message-----
From: Drew.Zeller@statcan.ca [mailto:Drew.Zeller@statcan.ca]
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 9:42 AM
To: samba@lists.samba.org
Subject: [Samba] Windows 2000 Terminal Server and SAMBA


Hi,

We a re planning to migrate from the Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server to the
Windows 2000 version sometime within the next few weeks.  From the
newsgroups and have gathered that the MULIPLEUSERSONCONNECTION registry
option that allowed each connection from the Terminal Server to start a
separate smb process has been disabled in the 2000 version.  Is there any
work arounds that can be done in the current version of SAMBA (2.2.3a)?  If
not, are there any plans to add something for this in later versions?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
To unsubscribe from this list go to the following URL and read the
instructions:  http://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/samba

Skipped content of type multipart/alternative-------------- next part
--------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Jan Mostert.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 715 bytes
Desc: not available
Url :
http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/attachments/20020409/cb5beebb/JanMostert.vcf

Hi Jan,
 
Thanks for the info.  It sounds like you have put a lot of effort in on
this.
 
Your idea for the netbios aliasing sounds intriguing.  I have no ideas
myself on what the limit of aliases might be, but I do have a test SAMBA
machine here which I might try playing with a little bit to see what I can
find out.
 
I saw the messages from Christian and yourself regarding moving up to SAMBA
2.2.3a and recommend the moving up all your servers to this version as I
believe the SAMBA versions after 2.0.7 were supposed to be a little better
with dealing with Windows 2000  (although I am not positive of this).  
Also, you might also want to look at the HP CIFS/9000 Server 2.2a version
1.08 now available (this version is based on SAMBA 2.2.3a, and has some
HP-UX enhancements included).  I am currently evaluating this for use on
some of our servers here. 
 
As for your problem with the file locks, you could try looking at the
CIFS/9000 Server 2.2a Release Notes (available from http://www.docs.hp.com
<http://www.docs.hp.com> ) as it contains some some recommendations for
setting of  kernel parameters on HP-UX systems.
 
Drew 
 
 
 -----Original Message-----
From: Jan Mostert [mailto:J.Mostert@GeoDelft.nl]
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 4:23 PM
To: drew.zeller@statcan.ca <mailto:drew.zeller@statcan.ca> 
Cc: samba@lists.samba.org <mailto:samba@lists.samba.org> 
Subject: RE: [Samba] Windows 2000 Terminal Server and Samba



Hello Drew,
 
The past two months we have been searching for a solution for this topic. We
run Citrix Metaframe 1.8 on W2k TS and had lots of performance problems. I
sent some questions about this to the list, but got no answers. 
 
What we finally found that was causing the problem is that we had our
Internet Explorer cache on a network drive (NT 4.0 SP6 server). Putting this
on a local drive gave an enormous performance boost.
 
We still are having problems with the performance to a Samba server. Indeed:
there is only one daemon per W2k server. We modified several registry
settings and turn off oplocks on both the Samba machine and the W2k servers,
but it does not make any difference. On the Samba server (HP A400, Hp-UX
11i, Samba 2.0.7) we see a lot of disconnects and reconnects. Why this is:
no answer from the list!
 
A way to force Samba to start more than one daemon is using a lot of Netbios
aliases for the same server. If you give every user an alias for the service
to connect, than every user gets its daemon. We have not yet implemented
this, so I don't know if there are any side-effects. I also don't know
if
there is a maximum number of aliases.
 
I think that there are not that many sites where they use W2k TS in
combination with Samba. That this combination gives problems is very clear
to me. I think this is a pitty; we almost were thinking of geting rid of
Samba and implement a Windows 2000 File server ...
 
Kind regards,
Jan Mostert
s are still not GeoDelft

Hey Guys,

I saw your postings and thought I would through in my two cents for the
Windows 2000 Terminal Server and Samba.  The MultipleUsersOnConnection does
not seem to work in Windows 2000 version of Terminal Server (at least not
for me).  My understanding is that Microsoft has removed that option in
Windows 2000.  What I have found, through various discussions in the Samba
newsgroups, as well as testing, it is possible to give a unique SMB process
to Terminal Server SAMBA connection, however to do this they need to access
the samba server through an alias for the SAMBA server.  In my tests this
was tried with both the SAMBA netbios aliases option, as well as creating
server name aliases through the local hosts file on my Terminal server.  In
both cases, each connection to the server, with a different host name alias,
was found to create a new smb process for each alias name connection and
this in turn helped with my file server performance problems (as well as
some file locking problems).

What I have started to do is create a unique server alias for each user that
goes to access the server (this way each user gets their own unique SMB
process), and so far no problems.  I have implemented this by creating a
SAMBA server host name alias in my Terminal server hosts file using the
users user id (this way the user id is not visible to anyone off of that
terminal server).  

Something to be aware of though is that in my case the most aliases I have
had to create at anyone time is around 50, so I do not know what the maximum
number of aliases possible would be (for either the netbios aliases option
or the local hosts file) so this may not be do-able in a large environment.
Also, in my case, user's normally only access files from one SAMBA server so
the user id aliases can work for me.  If someone needs to access another
server they just access it through the regular NetBIOS name, but since this
does not happen too often, it does not create noticeable performance
problems for my users (or at least none have been reported or noticed).

Hope this helps.