Samba Shared Folders over a WAN link

[Rick Stevens]

Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 14:44, Scot L. Harris wrote:
> 
>>On Thu, 2004-06-10 at 16:17, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
> 
> 
>>>How can I do the tunneling? Any suggestions? IPSEC? SSH? etc? I'm new in
>>>this.
>>>
>>
>>SSH would be easy to try.  It can be configured for compression so might
>>give you some improvement in throughput.
>>
>>I have had success using ssh with compression for vnc and x-windows
>>connections across the Internet.  It did improve the response times for
>>me. 
>>
>>
>>>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_
>>>--
>>
>>Maybe we need to step back from the problem a little.  Would nfs do the
>>trick?  I have not used nfs much but I think the overhead is less than
>>samba.  I take it one end point is a Windows box?  You might check out
>>cygwin.  It has a lot of unix type tools available.  
> 
> 
> 
> Both are Linux Boxes. I've tried Both NFS and SMB. Both Sucks. NFS sucks even 
> more than SMB. For some reason.

Have you tried NFS over TCP?  By default, NFS is a UDP protocol and many
WAN services give lower priority to UDP.  Try these options on the NFS
client:

	mount -t nfs -o tcp,nfsvers=3,wsize=8192,rsize=8192,hard,noac \
		server:/whatever /mountpoint

That forces NFS version 3 over TCP with 8K block sizes, hard mounts
(stall if connection is lost), and no attribute caching (to ensure
consistency--you can delete that if you wish).  Note that the server
must support NFS V3 and NFS over TCP (current Linux stacks do).  I'm
not saying it's perfect, but it's better than UDP.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
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