Samba Shared Folders over a WAN link

[Ow Mun Heng]

On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 12:10, Matt Morgan wrote:
> On 06/10/2004 02:53 PM, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> 
> >On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 14:44, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>Guys,
> >>
> >>	need some help.
> >>
> >>        is there any way to get smb packets to speed up over a WAN link.
> >>
> >>	Some way to prioritse the packets?
> >>
> >>There's a 1MB link from US to a server in Asia. Currently using FTP/HTTP
> >>conn will get like ~40-50KB/s transfer rate. However, using Samba, it's
> >>really very slow.

> >What you are seeing is expected.  That protocol has a lot more overhead
> >than straight TCP type apps.  Not a whole lot you can do to resolve that
> >problem aside from throwing more bandwidth at it.  And that may not
> >really fix it.  The latency of the link you have may be part of the
> >problem.  Have seen many dedicated private line and frame relay links
> >that are doing good to get 300ms response time between the U.S. and
> >Asia.  It is even worse if your link goes via satellite. 

Right now, ping times and traceroutes are showing up as 200ms latency.
ssh to the samba box is _ok_. not too bad, I get some feel of latency
but is generally acceptable.


> >
> >You might try tunneling the traffic and compressing it but I doubt that
> >would give you the kind of improvement you are looking for.

I'm not sure how that can be done. 
Currently I'm mounting the share from the samba box to my laptop.(mount
-t smbfs ) and saving files to it frequently have app hangs. (even
browsing folders)

How can I do the tunneling? Any suggestions? IPSEC? SSH? etc? I'm new in
this.

> >
> Is your bandwidth maxing out, because of a lot of different kinds of 
> traffic? Or does Samba go that slowly even when nothing else is taking 
> up bandwidth?

Seems like that's the case

> Scot's probably right, that's the way it's going to be with Samba. But 
> if it's not getting the whole pipe, then maybe you can speed it up with 
> some kind of QOS/traffic shaping, maximizing the bandwidth that Samba 
> gets while leaving some minimum for other protocols/ports. 

Problem here is that I'm not in direct control of the link. I"m just a
lonely end-user trying to get to my samba box at the other end of the
world

> If Samba is 
> slow even when it has the whole pipe to itself, then you could look at 
> some kind of replication setup, for example with rsync. But probably 
> either of my suggestions will cost you money/effort.

That's not largely a problem. The problem here is that I won't be able
to get a _real_time_ copy of the data. (unless I set up rsync like every
minute or so.. but the stress on the server and my notebook!)

Thanks guys. I guess there's nothing much that can be done. It's not
only Samba shares, even accessing windows shares are a _real_pain_
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