L F wrote:
Folks, I've been playing with multiple gigabit ethernet drivers to get samba 3.0.25+ to work reliably. The situation is as follows. I have a network, one of the machines on the network is a server/firewall. It contains an Intel PRO1000 dual port PCI Express card and runs Debian-testing. The machine is running shorewall 3.4.5 and at present, one port of the PRO1000 is configured as the WAN port, the other is bridged to a tap device for virtualbox and is running as the LAN port. Samba 3.0.25+ will either lose connection or - more worrisomely - corrupt data in files upon sustained traffic. One of the tests that consistently fails is mounting a samba share onto any WinXP client, then trying to unzip a file from the mounted/mapped drive into the drive itself (i.e. unzipping Z:\Stuff\qqq.zip to Z:\Stuff\qqq\* ). If the zip file is of any significant size, one of two things will happen. Either the client will complain about losing connection to the share - with a corrisponding error in the samba logs - or everything will be fine.. except the files will be corrupt. The unusual thing is that going through the TAP interface from a Virtualbox machine yields no problems even when transferring tens of GBs of data. Copying a large file (500MB+) also has the same effect. Now, the machine worked when it was using an onboard Realtek 8169 chipset on a 945G board from ASUS, but it worked slowly.
this slowness might have been masking the issue
I upgraded to a P965 chipset, started using the realtek driver for the 8110B on that board.. and started getting consistent samba errors. I therefore killed the onboard LAN, switched to the Intel board, tried both the 7.6.5 driver on the Intel website AND the driver in the 2.6.20+ kernels - 7.2.x IIRC - and it fails, less than it did with the realtek, but it fails. Switching back and forth between 2.6.18, 2.6.20.x and 2.6.22.x yielded no improvements. I could use some help, because I refuse to believe that there isn't a reliable PCIexpress gigeth/samba combo available.
I have not yet seen other reports of this issue, and it would be interesting to see if the stack or driver is seeing errors. Please post `ethtool -S eth0` after the samba connection resets or fails.
Just as a precaution, try a different ethernet cable. Even the switch in between the target and you might have issues.
I know our lab folks do plenty of samba testing but I will see if they can run a stress test against a smb target in the way that you describe.
Cheers, Auke - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe netdev" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
