Volker Lendecke wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 03, 2006 at 10:10:56AM -0500, Jeffrey Altman wrote:
>> People talk about how bad the performance of AFS is.  It is nowhere near
>> as bad as the performance of SMB.  You want your AFS client close to the
> 
> Probably arguing from a Samba pov on an afs list is just a Bad Idea (tm).
> 
> Volker

Not at all.   The performance problems of SMB are not Samba's fault.
They are a result of a protocol design that was conceived of when
2mb/sec local area networks running over token ring were considered
fast. The implementations can't be better than the protocol design
allows.

Using Samba has the benefit of using a protocol built into the client
to interface with AFS.  In fact, that is exactly how the OpenAFS for
Windows client works.  It is a SMB Server front end to an AFS Cache
Manager that sits on the local box and implements a set of custom
SMB IOCTL operations that allow it to communicate with the AFS Cache
Manager to perform AFS specific operations such as managing ACLs, etc.

Theoretically, Samba could implement those IOCTL operations and then
use the OpenAFS for Windows command line tools and AFS Shell Extension
to communicate with the Samba server.  That is in fact how Windows 3.1
was supported.  You would install an AFS for Windows client on an NT
box and then install a client that only provided some front end tools
that allowed for the creation of "SMB Shares" mapped to specific AFS
directories.

The problem is, in order to get those tools onto the client you still
need to install something.  So you might as well install a full AFS
client on the machine.

Jeffrey Altman

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