Samba Shared Folders over a WAN link

[Douglas Furlong]

> > 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.

If you have control of both boxes, may I suggest using NFS (tunnelling
it through an SSH/VPN connection for security), as I believe NFS offers
better performance of WAN's as compared to SMB.

There is the added benefit, that depending on mount time options, you
can instruct the system to not time out if the line goes down, in which
case your applications will "hang" but as soon as the link comes back
up, it will just carry on as if nothing ever happened, this will mean no
lost data, which is damn'd handy.
>From past experience if the connection to the SMB server drops, then you
have to restart the connection (if not the computer) and it all gets
VERY messy :(

You are also able to configure the size of the packets being sent back
and forth, so may be able to tweak for better performance.

Just a thought.

doug