Streaming over a shared Samba drive not working

[Rainsford]

So just to mess around I set up a file server with a linux box on the school network. It's connected to my other computer on a 10 mbit hub. The drives are shared using Samba on Mandrake 9.0 and my desktop is a Windows XP computer. Copying files is plenty fast, but streaming video gives me serious problems. It's all choppy and the sound gets ahead of the video and all that. I'm sure the videos are fine, but they just don't play over the network. But here's the thing, a 100 MB, 20 minute avi will copy from the server to the desktop in about 5 minutes or so, but streaming it doesn't work right. Any thoughts on why this would happen? I was thinking maybe the 10 mbit network was too slow, but why can it copy in 5 minutes but not play it right over a period of 20 minutes?

Oh, and just for reference, I have a Linksys 10/100 NIC in my desktop (the $15 kind), an SMC 10/100 (around $15) in my Linux box, and a generic brand 5 port 10 hub. Thanks in advance.

 

[Mucman]

10Mbit hub is most likely the culprit. How many other machines are plugged into the hub? Are they all creating network traffic?

 

[Rainsford]

Just these two machines are plugged in right now, and then one more port is taken up by the "uplink" to the rest of the campus network. I thought that might be the problem, but why can I copy is less time than the video takes to play and still not stream? It's fast enough then, right?

 

[Mucman]

As a test, unplug the uplink wire. The school's network might be generating a lot of broadcasts that is hurting the performance of the streaming. You have definitely have enough bandwidth to stream the
movie, but network latency might be hurting the stream.

Try running the following command on the linux box : tcpdump

Do you see a lot of traffic broadcasts?

What is the hardware of the fileserver? I have a P150 w 32M running FreeBSD, and I am able to watching an AVI streamed over the network on a win98 machine. I am using a 100MBit switch though.

 

[Rainsford]

I'll try those suggestions when I get back to school. As for the linux hardware, I have a Duron 700 with 128 megs of RAM. The hard drive is a brand new, 80 gig, 7200 RPM Maxtor.

 

[Mucman]

Definitely not a server hardware problem then

Keep us posted on the results!

 

[n0cmonkey]

Its a SAMBA issue if I remember correctly. google it, there is a setting you can set in your smb.conf to help with this issue. Again, this is if I remember correctly, Ive never had problems with this.

 

[DnetMHZ]

I had a simiar issue with my samba servers but it turned out to be a faulty switch on my network.

 

[Mucman]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Its a SAMBA issue if I remember correctly. google it, there is a setting you can set in your smb.conf to help with this issue. Again, this is if I remember correctly, Ive never had problems with this.

Hmm... I've never had this issue with samba... Rainsford, post your smb.conf as well... do you have : socket options = TCP_NODELAY?

Here is my smb.conf

[global]
workgroup = MUC
server string = Samba Server
hosts allow = 192.168.0.
guest account = nobody
log file = /var/log/log.%m
max log size = 500
security = share

ldap admin dn = "cn=Manager,dc=muclan,dc=com"
ldap server = localhost
ldap port = 389
ldap suffix = "dc=muclan,dc=com"
ldap ssl = off

encrypt passwords = yes
socket options = TCP_NODELAY

local master = yes
domain master = yes
wins support = yes
dns proxy = no

[mp3]
browseable = yes
writeable = yes
path = /usr/local/export/samba/mp3
public = yes
admin users = mucman
[homes]
comment = Home Directories
browseable = no
writeable = yes
[public]
browseable = yes
writeable = yes
path = /usr/local/export/samba/public
public = yes
admin users = mucman

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Mucman

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Its a SAMBA issue if I remember correctly. google it, there is a setting you can set in your smb.conf to help with this issue. Again, this is if I remember correctly, Ive never had problems with this.

Hmm... I've never had this issue with samba... Rainsford, post your smb.conf as well... do you have : socket options = TCP_NODELAY?

That might have been the option I was thinking about. I was tired when I wrote that, and Im tired now... And I could have just been confused in the first place since I have never had problems with it.

 

[Mucman]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Mucman

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Its a SAMBA issue if I remember correctly. google it, there is a setting you can set in your smb.conf to help with this issue. Again, this is if I remember correctly, Ive never had problems with this.

Hmm... I've never had this issue with samba... Rainsford, post your smb.conf as well... do you have : socket options = TCP_NODELAY?

That might have been the option I was thinking about. I was tired when I wrote that, and Im tired now... And I could have just been confused in the first place since I have never had problems with it.

/me smacks n0cmonkey and yells "Wake up!!!"

Where are you Rainsford? I would like to know if you got it working yet

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: Mucman

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: Mucman

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Its a SAMBA issue if I remember correctly. google it, there is a setting you can set in your smb.conf to help with this issue. Again, this is if I remember correctly, Ive never had problems with this.

Hmm... I've never had this issue with samba... Rainsford, post your smb.conf as well... do you have : socket options = TCP_NODELAY?

That might have been the option I was thinking about. I was tired when I wrote that, and Im tired now... And I could have just been confused in the first place since I have never had problems with it.

/me smacks n0cmonkey and yells "Wake up!!!"

Where are you Rainsford? I would like to know if you got it working yet

For having no job, Im not sleeping near enough....

 

[Rainsford]

I'm here, I'm here I tried a couple suggestions, with not too much success. First of all, here's my smb.conf file. I used the suggested settings for the most part and then just added a few shares.

[global]
workgroup = ISU
netbios name = homer
server string = Files

log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m

max log size = 50


security = user

encrypt passwords = yes
smb passwd file = /etc/samba/smbpasswd

socket options = TCP_NODELAY SO_RCVBUF=8192 SO_SNDBUF=8192

dns proxy = no


[home]
comment = Brian's Home
path = /home/blund
valid users = blund
public = no
writable = yes
printable =no

[vol0]
comment = Volume 0, 80 GB
path = /vol0
valid users = blund
public = no
writable = yes
printable = no

I tried unplugging the uplink to the schoo network, and that actually helped a little bit. But high bit-rate videos still don't work right. Any other suggestions I can try? Thanks a lot for all your help by the way.

 

[Mucman]

Hmm... try playing around with different send/receive buffer sizes. I don't specify the buffer sizes, and I don't experience any difficulties. Do the lights on your hub flash a lot when you aren't even doing anything?

What are you settings for your NICs? Do you have em hard set to 10Mbit/Half Duplex? Or are they on autosensing?

 

[Rainsford]

Thanks for all the help, I tried playing with buffer sizes, but my current settings seemed to be the best. What actually got it working was an upgrade of the Samba RPM from Mandrake. I guess the version that shipped with 9.0 was a pre-release version or something, the new one is a lot better and seems to work pretty much ok.

 

[Mucman]

Interesting... do you know what version of Samba you were running? This can be found by simply looking in the smbd log file... Look for something
similar to :

[2002/10/15 08:18:23, 0] smbd/server.c:main(707)
smbd version 2.2.5 started.
Copyright Andrew Tridgell and the Samba Team 1992-2002

As you can see I am running 2.2.5

 

[Rainsford]

Here's the version info for a start before the upgrade and after.

[2002/11/05 13:01:05, 0] smbd/server.c:main(707)
smbd version 2.2.6pre2 started.
Copyright Andrew Tridgell and the Samba Team 1992-2002
[2002/11/06 12:24:03, 0] smbd/server.c:main(707)
smbd version 2.2.6 started.
Copyright Andrew Tridgell and the Samba Team 1992-2002

 

[Mucman]

hmm... so you were running the pre-release version before! It would be interesting to find out what they changed...

 

[Rainsford]

Originally posted by: Mucman
hmm... so you were running the pre-release version before! It would be interesting to find out what they changed...

Yeah, I donno. Maybe the changed some variable called "sucky connection" from 1 to 0