alternatives to samba

[Missing Ghost]

I think I'm sick of samba. For me, at as just been a lot of trouble since the beginning. It sometimes give me weird errors where I lose my right to read or write for no apparent reason, and later it comes back. Interfacing between windows and *nix is a pain to, I can hardly chose what username/password I want to send, and also when I put smbd in user mode instead of in share mode, nothing work correctly, I can't even enter a password that will be accepted by the samba server.....I'm sick of this....there is also all the memory leaks and high cpu usage that I get on the server that crashed the server many time. So, what are my alternatives? I heard of sftp, but the only decent client that I can find is SftpDrive, and it's not free. If I could find something like that but free, it seems like I would have the perfect solution..... there is also ftp, but it's kind of old and crappy.

 

[Cooky]

Could you describe your network, and what you're trying to accomplish? Is this for personal or commercial environment?

I heard the latest Windows server OS has built-in interface w/ Unix but I've never personally confirmed it.
Samba is probably the most widely used to bridge Windows and Unix; if you don't like it, you can try NIS. It's not secure, but is very easy to set up.

The problem of you losing read/write permission was probably due to DNS lookup issue. Many Unix apps periodically check both forward and reverse DNS records before granting you permissions.

Edit
If you simply want to transfer files between Windows and Unix, all you need is to have SSH running on Unix, and then you can use clients like WinSCP. (it's free for both personal and commercial use)

 

[nweaver]

samba works fine, it's all in the setup and admininstration. I don't ever recall (even on an older debian with older samba) any memory leaks/odd CPU problems. I had 300+ days uptime on that box when we had to take it down for power stuff..

 

[skyking]

Originally posted by: nweaver
samba works fine, it's all in the setup and admininstration. I don't ever recall (even on an older debian with older samba) any memory leaks/odd CPU problems. I had 300+ days uptime on that box when we had to take it down for power stuff..

Agreed. I have several production samba machines out there, with no reboots except for moves and cleaning.

 

[Missing Ghost]

It's for personal usage, not commercial. It runs lan-only. There is about 8 computers, with almost no storage (like 10GB IDE drives). Then they just take their storage space from the server that has a ~600GB RAID5 scsi built from 10 drives, with gigabit ethernet. The OS is openBSD. I cannot use a software like winSCP, I need the remote hdd space mounted directly as a drive letter (clients are windows-based) so that it is available to all applications (applications are installed mainly on the server, they run from here) and not only for users. I would really like to know of some alternatives to samba. Right now I'm looking at NFS and iSCSI. Finally SftpDrive seems to have compatibility issues with some programs.

 

[cleverhandle]

Sorry to repeat what you don't want to hear, but the problem really isn't Samba's problem. My OpenBSD Samba server has 214 days of uptime at the moment. I'll agree that Samba is not always simple to learn or configure properly, but there really aren't other good options out there, as you're finding out. Why don't you post some details of your Samba config to the OS Forum? There are quite a few Samba veterans who hang out there...

 

[spikespiegal]

I've worked with Samba in the past, and found it to be nothing but a headache when involving Windows > Unix/Linux situations. Even when files and databases start getting corrupted Linux Admins refused to fix the problem and resorted to fiddling with the client settings while making constant anti-Microsoft remarks. I dealt with the same attitude with Novell and Netware for 10 years before killing it off and noting the 1000x increase in data integrity with Windows clients.

Two solutions: (2) Use a windows box for file/print services rather than 'freeware' solutions that run like their price. (2) Get a NAS box, which for some reason always seem to do a better job than Samba enve though the wrapper is theoretically the same.

My OpenBSD Samba server has 214 days of uptime at the moment

If all I had to do was file/print services off my Windows servers, which is typically all a Samba server does, my Windows servers would only have to be rebooted every 10 years, or until cosmic rays corrupt enough memory to make the box unstable, which ever comes first.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Do you have some directories with a LARGE number of files (several thousand)? What version of OpenBSD?

There was an issue with OpenBSD and samba with directories containing many files in the past. It should be fixed in -current. Here is the applicable commit. I did a small amount of testing with the patch and didn't see anything bad happen, but I don't use samba heavily.

I'd recommend running an OpenBSD snapshot. I haven't tested the latest on i386 yet, so I'm not sure if the ongoing hackathon has done anything to the stability of the tree (temporary of course ). It's been working well on my zaurus though (except for apm).

 

[Nothinman]

I've worked with Samba in the past, and found it to be nothing but a headache when involving Windows > Unix/Linux situations. Even when files and databases start getting corrupted Linux Admins refused to fix the problem and resorted to fiddling with the client settings while making constant anti-Microsoft remarks. I dealt with the same attitude with Novell and Netware for 10 years before killing it off and noting the 1000x increase in data integrity with Windows clients.

Blaming the software because the admins were incompetent is pretty stupid. I have _never_ had Samba corrupt data for me.

If all I had to do was file/print services off my Windows servers, which is typically all a Samba server does, my Windows servers would only have to be rebooted every 10 years, or until cosmic rays corrupt enough memory to make the box unstable, which ever comes first.

Or you have to install a patch that requires a reboot.

 

[Missing Ghost]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Do you have some directories with a LARGE number of files (several thousand)? What version of OpenBSD?

There was an issue with OpenBSD and samba with directories containing many files in the past. It should be fixed in -current. Here is the applicable commit. I did a small amount of testing with the patch and didn't see anything bad happen, but I don't use samba heavily.

I'd recommend running an OpenBSD snapshot. I haven't tested the latest on i386 yet, so I'm not sure if the ongoing hackathon has done anything to the stability of the tree (temporary of course ). It's been working well on my zaurus though (except for apm).

I've already investigated that issue in the past, it was solved with some program that sorted all the files in sub-directories. Yes I did have like 10k files in some of the directories, now I'll say each directory is max 500 items including the folders. I prefer to stick with the release version of OpenBSD, except that I do apply the patches. Now I'm on 3.9 with the single sendmail patch that I needed. I find it bad that there is no real alternative to samba. I think that samba is far too heavy and includes to much stuff that was accumulated over the years. There is far too much retro-compatibility stuff and all that. I would like it if they could do some kind of "Samba-lite". Could you do something for me, n0cmonkey? Try to do a lot of file access to your samba server (like a sandra stress-test or something) and tell me how much memory/swap space smbd takes. Thanks

 

[Nothinman]

I think that samba is far too heavy and includes to much stuff that was accumulated over the years.

It has to be heavy, it's implementing an extremely heavy protocol. I've heard of at least one other SMB server (can't remember it's name right now though) but it was only really in use many years ago and it was commercial so it's probably not around now.

I would like it if they could do some kind of "Samba-lite".

That's an oxymoron. I suppose it would be possible to slim it up a bit if you removed all of the legacy Win9X stuff and just did CIFS, but I doubt it would take much off.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Missing Ghost

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Do you have some directories with a LARGE number of files (several thousand)? What version of OpenBSD?

There was an issue with OpenBSD and samba with directories containing many files in the past. It should be fixed in -current. Here is the applicable commit. I did a small amount of testing with the patch and didn't see anything bad happen, but I don't use samba heavily.

I'd recommend running an OpenBSD snapshot. I haven't tested the latest on i386 yet, so I'm not sure if the ongoing hackathon has done anything to the stability of the tree (temporary of course ). It's been working well on my zaurus though (except for apm).

I've already investigated that issue in the past, it was solved with some program that sorted all the files in sub-directories. Yes I did have like 10k files in some of the directories, now I'll say each directory is max 500 items including the folders. I prefer to stick with the release version of OpenBSD, except that I do apply the patches. Now I'm on 3.9 with the single sendmail patch that I needed. I find it bad that there is no real alternative to samba. I think that samba is far too heavy and includes to much stuff that was accumulated over the years. There is far too much retro-compatibility stuff and all that. I would like it if they could do some kind of "Samba-lite". Could you do something for me, n0cmonkey? Try to do a lot of file access to your samba server (like a sandra stress-test or something) and tell me how much memory/swap space smbd takes. Thanks

I'll try to mess with it a bit next week.

 

[Missing Ghost]

That's really weird, mysteriously samba started to work flawlessly last night! It dropped from 200MB memory usage to 4MB, and the cpu usage from 85% to 0,5% in the exact same benchmark. If only I could know how to find out what happened...