Re: [K12OSN] NFS and Samba questions

[Steve Langasek <vorlon dodds net>]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 03:34:13PM -0800, Quentin Hartman wrote:
> Greetings-	
> 	I am thinking about using multiple NFS servers, with filesystems 
> 	mounted on one central Samba / NFS server ( effectively making the setup 
> similar to Microsoft's DFS for NT) so that all my staff and students can 
> access their work from both the Linux terminals I have going (great work 
> guys!) and the Win 9x workstations throughout the District. My biggest 
> concern is the performance of the Samba machine. How beefy of a machine am 
> I going to need to act as the "hub" for this layout? I expect to have no 
> more than 300 simultaneous requests to it, and that is fine, that hardware 
> shouldn't have a problem with that, but how does adding NFS to the mix 
> impact things? I have not used NFS before and not found anything online 
> that seems to refer to using NFS and Samba together this way to achieve a 
> multi-platform approximation of DFS. Any thoughts?

Why not use DFS itself?

/builds/samba-2.2.3a/source> ./configure --help | grep msdfs
  --with-msdfs            Include MS Dfs support (default=no)

Seems like a better option than trying to emulate this using NFS.  It 
sounds to me like you're talking about NFS-mounting everything on a 
central server, and re-sharing that data using Samba, am I right?  This 
would be bad, very bad -- it would literally reduce the bandwidth 
available on your LAN by about two-thirds, and buying a bigger server 
won't rid you of that.

I suspect that the DFS support now available in the Samba 2.2 tree (if you 
compile it yourself) is a better fit for this problem.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer