samba - Feb 2006 - lilesystem size limit samba on 64bit 2.6 kernel vs. clients win2k/winxp ?

I had an incredibly hard time finding any documentation on filesystem size
limits for samba on 64bit linux with 2.6 kernel exporting to 32bit windows 2003
and windows-xp by googling.

The closest I could get to was that cifs filesystem size correlates to ntfs
filesystem size and therefore there would be a 64TB limit. Are there additional
limits within the software stack that I should be aware of?

We are considering exporting a 40TB xfs filesystem striped over 20 2TB luns on a
fibre channel SAN via LVM2 on SLES9-SP3, and will be falling back to 16TB
filesystems if necessary. Anything below that would be cumbersome because of the
amount of mountpoints.

Can the 32bit windows clients keep up with that size as long as the files on the
filesystem are not larger than 4GB?

Michael

On 2/14/06, Michael Will <mwill@penguincomputing.com>
wrote:
> I had an incredibly hard time finding any documentation on filesystem size
> limits for samba on 64bit linux with 2.6 kernel exporting to 32bit windows
2003
> and windows-xp by googling.
>
> The closest I could get to was that cifs filesystem size correlates to ntfs
> filesystem size and therefore there would be a 64TB limit. Are there
additional
> limits within the software stack that I should be aware of?
Possibly. I've exported a virtual 1PB filesystem to windows clients and they
appeared to handle it ok.
> We are considering exporting a 40TB xfs filesystem striped over 20 2TB luns
on a
> fibre channel SAN via LVM2 on SLES9-SP3, and will be falling back to 16TB
> filesystems if necessary. Anything below that would be cumbersome because
of the
> amount of mountpoints.
XFS will handle this just fine. Be aware that xfs_repair may take a fair
amount of time and memory on very large filesystems. IIRC there was some
scaling work done recently, but I'm not sure if it made SP3.
> Can the 32bit windows clients keep up with that size as long as the files
on the
> filesystem are not larger than 4GB?
I've never seen modern windows clients have problems with large files of
filesystems. I don't expect you will have problems.

--
James Peach | jorgar@gmail.com