Help sharing entire drive directory with Samba + Knoppix 5.0

[Harry Kuhman]

.... xfering 15gigs of data at a stead 12mbit a second

That's just not right... XP to XP it's running a lot faster then that...

There is absolutely no reason to think that Microsoft wouldn't deliberately work slower when it detects a non-Xp OS out there. In fact I can assure you that it does. Of course, I can't say that this is a deliberate effort to make Linux look bad, but form your own opnion about that.

If transfer speed matters then I suggest firing up an FTP server on XP and using Konquror as an FTP client on Knoppix, your transfers will be much faster (with the same ethernet drivers).

[pstone]

heh - well the issue is that this is an active gaming center and we can't have ftp servers running in the background on all the machines... I'm thinking it's some sort of setting of the ethernet card on the unix machine maybe?

We chose unix as our fileserver because of the limitation in windows of how many machines can be on the network at one time (something like 10 or 12 in XP) and we need all machines to be able to access batch files and mounting CD images all at once. With over 30 machines, you can't do that with a windows file server without paying thousands of dollars to get past the machine limitation.

Every once in a while however we would like to push 10gigs or so to a bunch of machines at once. Our old 100 based network system did this without the hiccups we're seeing here but once we added the gig network, not only does the unix box show 1/8th the speed, but when we push from 1 machine source to more then 1 machine, we get massive slow downs...

1:1 machine push of 15 gigs of data = 8 mins
1:2 machines push of 15 gigs od data = 100 mins avg each machine... somethings wrong there

Turning flow control off really screwed things up strangly enough and Jumbo Frames made no difference.

[Harry Kuhman]

heh - well the issue is that this is an active gaming center and we can't.....

I'm not at all clear on what you are trying to do. If you are trying to have a way to let customers outside your local network send files to your system, or send files from your system to them, then you are inviting trouble, even with XP. More and more ISPs, some very large ones, are actively blocking the ports used in Microsoft file sharing. (A reprocussion of file sharing being so insecure and of many older systems having it on and sharing files with the entire world by default.) If you're only talking about moving files in-house then you certainly could have a secure small FTP server running all of the time, or you could use any number of ways to automatically start one just when you need it. By the way, I don't believe you'll find only XP to Linux transfers to be slower than XP to XP transfers. Even transfers from Win98 to Xp are much slower than transfers between XP and Xp or between Win98 and Win98.

And I certainly hope you're not using Knoppix in this system as a production tool. A Linux intended for hard disk install makes so much more sense.

[mr-roboto]

Actually, I don't believe that Samba is the issue. As I wrote earlier, when I was new to Samba, I tried to use it as pstone is, by using FAT32 partitions for my shares. Sub-optimal idea. A hdrive-installed Linux won't completely address these issues. However once the Samba config file is perfected (tweaked out), ext2 partitions are created and shared, Samba will perform quite well as compared to a XP/2K3 server box. (BTW, I also learned the hard way that not all Linux Ethernet drivers are equal, particularly in a LAN/NAS context.) Knoppix' Samba Server script is the best that a newbie can expect, prior to learning to customize an optimal solution for Linux-based NAS.

Tweaking Samba is a non-trivial (altho not difficult) exercise, esp for a Linux newbie. One answer to that is NAS-Lite. Server Elements gets pretty good reviews and is a very inexpensive way to jump-start a Linux-based NAS server, that comes standard w/ other helpful bells-n-whistles....

[mr-roboto]

Here's a link to O'Reilly's Using Samba, Appendix B, covering performance tuning.....

[pstone]

Ok - problem solved - dropped Knoppix - using debian. Works like a dream. Just need to not only share the drive with it's built in sharing but also mount drive w/fstab as if you don't you can't actually change the permissions to allow for any guests to log into it - DOH -