samba - Sep 2007 - VFAT filesystem and large files

Hello 
I have used samba for many years, and it worked great (thanks!).
Anyway, I recently decided to add a USB drive to the server.
Currently running 2.6.29.2 linux kernel, debian etch.
samba version 3.0.24
The USB drive is VFAT

I am able to write small files  remotely to the USB drive (a few Kb, 10's of
Kb) without a problem.
However, whenever I try to write something "larger" (like 1 Mb), the
client machine "freezes" for a
while (about 1 minute or so), then returns an error saying the file could not be
written.
However, if I look at the share under which the USB drive is mounted, a file
exist, however, it is
all "0"'s.
If I log onto the server with ssh, i can cp large files from ext3 drive to the
VFAT USB drive
without problems.

I found a post about this somewhere (I can't seem to find it again), which
said this was a problem
with the VFAT code, not samba.

I was wondering, is this is the case?  is the is a work-around?  Basically, is
there a way to write
large files via samba to a VFAT USB drive?

thanks

bye - ted

On 9/22/07, t-wynnychenko@northwestern.edu
<t-wynnychenko@northwestern.edu> wrote:
> Hello
> I have used samba for many years, and it worked great (thanks!).
> Anyway, I recently decided to add a USB drive to the server.
> Currently running 2.6.29.2 linux kernel, debian etch.
> samba version 3.0.24
> The USB drive is VFAT
>
> I am able to write small files  remotely to the USB drive (a few Kb,
10's of Kb) without a problem.
> However, whenever I try to write something "larger" (like 1 Mb),
the client machine "freezes" for a
> while (about 1 minute or so), then returns an error saying the file could
not be written.
> However, if I look at the share under which the USB drive is mounted, a
file exist, however, it is
> all "0"'s.
> If I log onto the server with ssh, i can cp large files from ext3 drive to
the VFAT USB drive
> without problems.
>
> I found a post about this somewhere (I can't seem to find it again),
which said this was a problem
> with the VFAT code, not samba.
>
> I was wondering, is this is the case?  is the is a work-around?  Basically,
is there a way to write
> large files via samba to a VFAT USB drive?
Well, since it works via SSH, it would seem like a weird conclusion
the problem lies with the file system. Samba is only a userspace
program like cp.

That said: vfat means Pain! PAIN!! *PAIN!!!*

The design of the FAT files ystem is maybe 20 or 25 years old. It was
simple and perfect in the days when the average computer had 20 MB
hard drives with 50 files on them. It is not scalable. It is not
suitable for large file systems (and nowadays every new computer comes
with them). It is not suitable for large files. Besides, it's
unreliable and slow. If you're hooking the drive to a Samba server
anyway, just reformat it with a real file system, like ext3.


-- 
Frank Van Damme

A: Because it destroys the flow of the conversation
Q: Why is it bad?
A: No, it's bad.
Q: Should I top post in replies to mails or on usenet?

Hello

I was trying to keep the USB drive as FAT so that I could easily move it a
Windows machine if necessary.

anyway, i found the reference (i don't know why i was having trouble last
night) -

------
Gerald (Jerry) Carter jerry at samba.org
Thu Aug 24 16:00:45 GMT 2006

Mattias Rönnblom wrote:
> When copying large files from my Windows XP machine 
> to this share, smbd seem to "reserve" (by using ftruncate())
> the space needed on the USB disk before actually doing
> any copying. This ftruncate() operation takes quite
> a while when the file is large. It may even cause the
> client to time out.
...
> Would you consider this a problem in Samba or in 
> the VFAT filesystem driver?
IIRC our stance is that it's a problem with the
VFAT driver.  This issue has some up before.
------

so, that is more than a year old - is there more information about this at this
point.  i tried
specifying "strict allocate = no" - but that did not change anything.

thanks
bye - ted

==============Original message text==============On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:49:06 pm
+0100 "Daniel O'Connor" wrote:

You could put ext2/3 on it and use this in Windows ->
http://www.fs-driver.org/
I've never tested it though.

===========End of original message text==========
At one point a year or so ago, i mounted a ext2 filesystem on a win2K machine.
It did work.
However, the reason I asked about VFAT is I wanted to have a USB drive that
could be removed from
the samba server and used on (pretty much) "any" windows/linux
computer (without installing/modify
the recipient computer).  VFAT gives me that (unfortunately).

thanks 
bye - ted

t-wynnychenko@northwestern.edu wrote:
> 
> I found a post about this somewhere (I can't seem to find it again),
which said this was a problem
> with the VFAT code, not samba.
> 
> I was wondering, is this is the case?  is the is a work-around?  Basically,
is there a way to write
> large files via samba to a VFAT USB drive?
> 
> thanks
> 

Hmm, I'm sorry, I don't have any great insights into this problem... I 
was wondering, however, if you might have some error message in your 
dmesg log of the server when the error occurs?  that might be helpful.

btw, usually, and people say large files, they are talking about 2G, or 
at least several hundred MB.  I think if this is supported at all, you 
should be getting more than your 1 KB :)