Hi,
We have an office-based Windows-locked publishing system whose only
delivery mechanism is to write to a local filesystem, and a requirement
for its output to be available to a collocated production environment
comprising Solaris and Linux boxes. The 'obvious' solution was to run a
Samba server on one of the collocated Linux boxes and mount the share it
provides on the relevant Windows machines in the office. And this is
what I have done. This works, but encounters the problem I am about to
describe.
SCENARIO ONE:
Connecting to the server/share in Explorer (Windows XP) by typing the
path (\\dns.host.name\share) into the address bar is accomplished
without problem, as is receiving a directory listing. But uploading a
file to the remote share (by drag and dropping) causes Explorer to
freeze for anything between 10 and 30 seconds after which the file
transfers at good speed.
SCENARIO TWO:
Map the remote share, using same connection details. Now copy is often
fine, but sometimes will just fail with a "Cannot copy
<filename>: The specified network name is no longer available." and
leave a zero-length file at the remote end.
Not infrequently, smbd processes are being left in an 'uninterruptible
sleep' state.
If I mount the remote share via smbmount onto a Linux server in the
office, I don't encounter any of these problems.
Packet-sniffing on scenario one shows that the pause is happening before
any set-up for the file transfer: it looks like the client
disconnects, then there's a pause, then it reconnects.
I'm using Samba version 3.0.25b-1.el4_6.4 on RHEL ES release 4. Clients
are Windows XP Pro. Our office has a fairly large and complex LAN which
is managed by a separate department. Access to the Internet is, not
surprisingly, via a NATting gateway. Appropriate ports have been opened
in the firewalls, though all communication is in Direct-hosted mode (ie,
I only see traffic on port 445/tcp).
smb.conf looks like this:
[global]
workgroup = WG123
netbios name = n2323 # hostname of server
server string = FOO-BAR-Samba
#wins proxy = yes
#wins server = xxx.xx.xx.x
security = user
passdb backend = tdbsam
load printers = no
# idle time (mins) before client is disconnected
dead time = 15
keepalive = 10
socket options = IPTOS_THROUGHPUT SO_SNDBUF=8576
inherit permissions = yes
[test-xml]
path = /stuff/test-xml
writeable = Yes
public = no
Could anyone suggest what might be going on here?
Thanks,
Alex.
--
Alex Hooper | <w> www.bmjpg.com
Systems and Database Administration | <e> ahooper@bmjgroup.com
BMJ Knowledge, BMJ Publishing Group | <t> +44 20 7383 6049
BMA House, LONDON, WC1H 9JR |
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