On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 11:00:43PM -0800, Jim Beard wrote: > I saw that recent thread about memory and Samba, and I had a > general Samba usage question that I thought might be appropriate. We > recently migrated our file server at work from a crappy winblows box to > a nice RedHat distro. The RedHat box has RAID up and working so we > thought it would be best to handle the data. Lately we've been having > some usage issues. We made the RAID device available via Samba over the > network and sometimes we notice quite a bit of delay in accessing info. > When someone tries to open a directory it can take anywhere from 30 > seconds to a minute before they response comes back. Obviously this > kind of stuff gets annoying on a daily basis. Anyone had a similar > problem or advice?
The client is trying to do name resolution. Windows name resolution is a shaky proposition, and varies between each version of the operating system, and by the way it's configured. It tries several techniques, including trying to query a WINS server and simply broadcasting to the whole network. It sounds like it's trying one technique, which fails, then falling back to another, which works. I recommend making sure that you have a WINS server setup, and making sure that every machine is setup to use the WINS server (including the Samba machine). The best way to make Windows boxes using a WINS Server is by setting the WINS server variable on your DHCP server (assuming you're using DHCP). There is also a WINS Mode setting which you will want to set to H-mode, or hyrbrid mode, or 0x08. This will tell the Windows machines to try contacting the WINS server first, then broadcasting to the network if that fails. -- Agthorr
