Home Networking via NFS.SAMBA

[knewman01]

So, I have almost completed my purge of Windows. All systems in my house are running various flavors of Linux. Here's the problem:

Between my wife and I, we have about 30 gigs of MP3's (b4 you ask, all legal, ripped from CD's we own) currently residing on our server. I want to use this as a mountable drive on the workstations.

I know that I can use NFS or Samba to accomplish this. I'd prefer to use NFS, since it's native.

But it's just slow. I've upped rsize and wsize to 8192 in fstab, and it doesn't help. All NIC's are 100/Full. And yet it takes over 15 minutes to transfer 100 megs.

Should I just use Samba, or is there something I'm missing?

[cowanrl]

NFS is not normally that slow. I just tested copying a 24 meg file from an NFS share on one of my servers and it took 4 seconds(RH 7.2 to RH 8).

The server is a Dell Optiplex, 400Mhz PII with 256MB of RAM and just the IDE controller that came with it. Nothing special about the hard drive. I am on a 100Mbps network, everything running 100-Full.

What type of a machine is your server? How much free memory do you have? Do you have other network problems?

If you execute ifconfig on both the server and workstation, does it show excessive collisions or errors on the network interface?

I think if you ran Samba on that server, you'd get the same performance. You probably have problems elsewhere. Only one way to find out though.

[rustskull]

If you don't have to, don't use nfs or samba. Stay native...

If your stuff is on a windows native partition and you want to get away from it, simply allocate within your server and just copy everything locally to the linux native fs. This will amount to pushing the stuff from one fstype to another locally, so the translation time is simply a fstype conversion and a rewrite to the same system.

The new kernel can read ntfs pretty well, if you are uncomfortable with mounting ntfs directly, you can use samba. You could also archive/compresss/zip the directories and pull them across that way, the compression utilities can check for corruption or you can md5sum it, reducing the risk of moving stuff from windows fs to linux fs.

Also, you can boot up windows on the machine that has the windows fs (and the desired files) on it and mount it to your target linux machine using smbclient (man smbclient). Then just copy/move the files to a partition on the local machine. It should be faster than forcing everything to work with nfs.

-rust