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Samba Beats Windows IT Week Labs Test Results
jmhowitt writes "Tests by IT Week Labs
show the latest version of the open-source Samba file and print server software is 2.5 times faster than Windows Server 2003 in the same role.
The news comes as many firms are grappling with the consequences of Microsoft ending support for NT4, coupled with uncertainty about when Microsoft will next update Windows. The performance difference between Windows Server 2003 and Samba 3 has increased dramatically compared with Samba 2 and Windows 2000 Server."
See article...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Apart from how bloody quick it is is the fact that you can log every transaction. This is immensely useful in a mission critical environment when you have to figure our exactly why one person in particular out of the entire network is having trouble. Check your Samba logs and 99.9% of the time your answer will be there.
As a system administrator I appreciate having that level of scrutiny on any network I take care of.
"And then I visited Wikipedia
A frequent rule in the Windows business is to split systems up over many machines. Which is great for Microsoft because essentially, you pay per client connection. With Linux/Samba, you pay according to the support that you want.
The really good thing in 3.0 was allowing the participation in ADS networks (Win 2K) as well as NT4.0. Domain controller support could be better for ADS, but otherwise it is fine.
See my journal, I write things there
you mean, there is a kernel implementation of the NFS daemon. There is also one which runs purley in userspace, but on Linux, it is not used very much anymore nowadays.
There is smbclient in userspace (which is similar to an FTP client), but if you want to mount an SMB share into the linux VFS, you need the kernel module - like you need the NFS kernel module if you want to mount an NFS filesystem.
I serve printers from samba boxes to WinXP and W2k clients. I do not like dealing with setting up print queues on unix (unix printing and modem handling are evil, created by spawns of satan to make systems administrators miserable for all eternity), and I don't like Samba's way of dealing with them. It's still a bit too black-magic-swing-a-cat-over-your-head-at-midnigh
I've found CUPS to be a magnificent way of dealing with this; the combination of Samba, Unix, and WinXP/2k actually deals with printers very nicely over IPP.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
There are a lot of people asking about the numbers.
Well, I get the print edition of IT Week and the numbers are there on page 19, in the form of a lovely little graph. The (print) article says they used a HP ProLiant BL10 eCLass Server (900MHz PIII, 40Gb ATA, 512Mb Ram) and goes in to a little detail about the benchmarking software used.
I couldn't see a copy of the article on their website but you can download an electronic copy, in some god-forsaken windows only ebook format, from www.itweek.co.uk/ebook.
Boring Old Fart (40, married, 3 kids...er no...make that 49, married, 3 grown up kids...it's been a long time)
Samba on FAT? Are you sure about that?
Sure, I guess it is possible - since linux can mount FAT, but why? FAT is by far not an ideal filesystem.
I'd just put your scratchpad on ext3/JFS/reiserfs/xfs/whatever and use the appropriate umask in your samba config file to make all files world writable.
to centralize auth you can use : NIS/NIS+ + PAM -> http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/NIS-HOWTO/index.html OpenLDAP + PAM -> http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/docs/ldap-auth2.p hp
http://www.skills-1st.co.uk/papers/security-with-l dap-jan-2002/security-with-ldap.html
SAMBA + PAM ->
http://www.unav.es/cti/ldap-smb/smb-ldap-3-howto.h tml
http://www.mandrakesecure.net/en/docs/samba-ldap-a dvanced.php
PAM is the way to go -> http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/libs/pam/
The article that you read stated how much faster Windows 2003 was vs. Samba was at transferring very large files. It mentioned nothing of testing performance under large user loads which is more indicative of actual corporate networks. Also, the Windows team was allowed to tweak their installation of Windows 2003 to get maximum performance. Their installation of Samba was a basic installation with no optimizations. Their reasoning for that was that they didn't know Linux and Samba well enough to tweak it.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Well, Mr. Doubting Thomas, if you look at the #1 highest modded reply, it says "Great, now where are the numbers".
That's is this groups way of calling "FUD".
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
Samba, as good as it is, implements M$ holes, so that M$ transmitted diseases from your client boxes can fill up or wipe out your shares after calling home and giving away everything you care to keep to yourself.
WTF are you talking about? The permissions you have on a mapped drive has nothing to do with what you mapped the drive with. Samba, NFS, Novell, FTP, HTTP or logging in locally all depend on permissions you are given to the file system.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
As Steve Jobs would want, here are the 'Lickable Links':
To centralize auth you can use:
NIS/NIS+ + PAM
OpenLDAP + PAM and More
SAMBA + PAM
Advanced LDAP/Samba
PAM is the way to go
Fellowship 9/11
I'll focus on the network cache consistancy problem since that's the one I've had problems with. I don't know about the general speed issue (what speed are you referring to? throughput? Resource availablility? Master Browser updates? connection speed and concurrency under a heavy user load? ) I have experienced all kinds of problems with a highly volitile network, with programmers running multiple OS's inside of virtual machines. These virtual OS's need to be frequently restarted, meaning the network is constantly gaining and droping objects.
A prime example of Microsoft's bad cache coherency problem is that if an object is deleted or removed from the network, the information can take over an hour to propogate through the entire network. The worst case isn't nearly as bad in the pure-Samba implementation, but the difficulty remains. This failure means that newly added resources aren't immediately visible on the network, or recently removed resources take a long time to be removed, and show up as errors when you try to access them. Or the object can be visible on some machines, but not available on others.
When there is a high level of volitility on the network (machines being frequently rebooted or shut down, network re-wiring, etc.) this can really plague any SMB or CIFS network, but is especially hard on Windows boxes, and more so the older your Windows implementation. Problems are exacerbated if either the LMB or LMB-backup system is the one going back up and down, because the Windows boxes will respond less-quickly to the problem; this results in further instability for the SMB network, since critical nodes are not available, propogate incorrect data, and take longer to reconfigure.
As you mentioned, the Samba boxes are faster than the Windows boxes, but not as big of a difference as you experience. You said you have "a LAN full of Win2000/XP boxes", which probably means they are on most or all of the time. Is it unreasonable to assume that the author has a more volitle network, or is otherwise more prone to speed impairment issues?
frob
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
You are kidding, aren't you?
I don't think he is.
I'm on a large LAN (100mbit, switched) with lots of machines running SMB servers. transferring a file to my machine on that LAN using SMB on a good day I get a transfer rate of max. 2 Mbyte/sec.
When I transfer files through FTP from my machine at work to my machine at home I get transfer rates of up to 6 Mbyte/sec. This is through the same network, the internet and the network at work. Local FTP transfers can be even faster depending on the speed (HD, CPU, RAM) of the server and client.
Sadly the MS Empire does not allow you to release benchmark stats for their products. You agree to this when you use their products through their EULA. I am sure IT Labs doesn't want to get crap over it. Then agian, maybe they will find a way to post the numbers.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison