DFS – questions on Samba/SMB/CIFS

[bentman013]

My environment is an array of Mac Pro’s and Mac Mini’s, all on Leopard. I’m waiting until 10.6.3 for Snow Leopard as it always takes a bit to get everything worked out.

We used to talk to a Windows 2000 server that had SFM installed. Unfortunately, it crashed, and we moved them to another Windows 2000 Server, this time using SMB out of the box. Performance dropped off slightly.

Now we moved that infrastructure into Microsoft’s DFS, with the backend being an array of NAS storage, accessible by CIFS/SMB.

Per the recommendations, I tried out ExtremeZ-IP; that was a mistake. Not to mention the widget or the client worked terribly, the product on the server wasn’t stable enough. I’ve been doing this for 8 years so I have a good idea of what’s good and what’s not. And that wasn’t. Not to mention, all it does it make my users connect to another server just as a pass-through out to the NAS.

So we’re going with Admit-Mac; I don’t mind the product as it’s got a nice auto mount feature and it’s connects using DFS. But there’s still some performance issues that I keep seeing and that, through network traces, etc, looks to be a lot of chatter via SMB. Doing the research, Leopard has an older build of Samba installed and I don’t really want to go through compiling the latest Samba and making a mess of my users’ machines.

Is there a DMG packaged install of the latest Samba? Or is there another way to get my Mac users to talk to the DFS shares via AFP? The performance connecting over CIFS isn’t the best and after making all the recommended changes to the smb.conf file, it’s still leaving something to desire.

[reidlewis]

Hi Bentman013,

Can I ask you to share your experiences with our Tech Support Team? We’re working hard to improve our DFS functions which are new to ExtremeZ-IP and your experience is very valuable to that effort. Call them or email support at grouplogic.com

As you know, ExtremeZ-IP is the only DFS solution that supports Snow Leopard today. Our goal is to deliver the same level of quality in the DFS components that we’ve achieved in the many other functions of the product. If you don’t think we’ve done that, I thank you in advance for helping us move the product forward with your detailed feedback.

Regarding this point:

> Not to mention, all it does it make my users connect to another server just as a pass-through out to the NAS

There is no “pass through” in the workflow. The role of the DFS functions of ExtremeZ-IP are identical to the DFS service on Windows, that is to help users navigate the DFS namespace and resolve DFS paths. Once the navigation is complete, the file sharing connections occur directly from the Mac file sharing client to the DNS target file server (the NAS in your topology) and no data passes through ExtremeZ-IP. Connections may be over either AFP or SMB to suit your requirements and equipment.

See you at MacWorld!

– Reid

T. Reid Lewis
CEO
Group Logic, Inc.
1100 N. Glebe Rd, Suite 800, Arlington, VA 22201 USA
Tel: +1.703.528.1555 Fax: +1.703.528.3296
Web: [url]http://www.grouplogic.com[/url]

Creators and publishers of:
ArchiveConnect: Macintosh integration for file archiving solutions [url]http://www.grouplogic.com/archiveconnect[/url]
ExtremeZ-IP: Macintosh file & print server for Windows [url]http://www.grouplogic.com/extremez-ip[/url]
MassTransit: automated file transfer solution for Windows & Macintosh [url]http://www.grouplogic.com/masstransit[/url]
Installation, integration and professional services for our products

[bentman013]

Reid,

Thanks for your reply on this. I’ve been working closely with Bashar during my time with ExtremeZ-IP and unfortunately, it didn’t end up working for us.

On the server side, it always seemed to refresh the list of available servers in the DFS name space. It would do this at least 5 – 10 times a day. And when that was happening, I could never see the DFS namespace available through the widget and/or the client. Also, the service would need to be restarted a couple times a day, and with that, another refresh of the DFS name space would happen. Our environment is VERY large, and a refresh takes approximately 10 minutes to complete.

Those were my real problems; I just couldn’t “use” it enough to say one way or another if it was reliable or not. When it worked, it was great; it just spent most of the time refreshing itself.

-Scott

[reidlewis]

Scott,

Ah. that’s very useful feedback. I will get the team on it pronto.

If its OK with you, our engineers may reach out to understand precisely what you mean by VERY large so we can be sure to engineer and test accordingly.

– Reid

PS – If we find ourselves in the same town, dinner’s on me!

[bentman013]

Sounds good. And again, I’ll be more than happy to work with them to show them what I experienced.

Thanks!!

[M@]

It is a very good move to wait, and I would recommend waiting until the following problem is fixed:

http://www.macwindows.com/snowleopard-filesharing.html

Apple has introduced a fairly annoying bug in the Finder with how it interacts with Windows Fileservers — you cannot copy a file up to the server without getting an error message (the file in fact does copy, but the error prevents you from copying more than one file at a time). Microsoft Office also cannot save over files opened directly from the fileserver (“Save-As” to another filename does work, as does saving to your desktop and then copying back up to the fileserver).

Further, this error occurs only for non-administrators on the FileServer so unless you test as an account without “Full Control” enabled you won’t see it…

Hopefully they’ll get it resolved in 10.6.3

The work-around is to copy the files via the Terminal:

[code] “cp -R” drag file/folder you wish to copy to the terminal ” ” drag the file/folder you want to copy TO on the server[/code]

(dragging the folders on top of the terminal auto-types the path for you).

As far as the Microsoft Office bug (2008), you just save it locally or save it to the server as a different filename.

[bentman013]

Thanks M@….funniest thing was I was reading that this morning and was thinking the exact same thing.

I can attest to the problems as well. I put Snow Leopard on my machine today to test it out with this setup and wow, it was horrendously slow. You can’t even work with it.

[thomasb]

We had smiliar experiences with ExtremeZ-IP and DFS at work. It looked promising on paper, but it did unfortunatly not work as expected for us either. After hours of troubleshooting, we decided to go an other route this time. We might use ExtremeZ-IP just for sharing out SMB as AFP, to get both better speed and lightning fast Spotlight searches on some SMB shares – we’ll see.

The way it looks now, we will go for Thursby DAVE for DFS support, until something better comes along. I really wish Apple and Microsoft could include built-in support for it in Mac OS X. The way it is now, as far as I understand, Finder makes it really hard for third party companies to give reliable DFS support. Thursby also have some issues http://www.thursby.com/support/faq/?id=602 but it still works better than ExtremeZ-IP for us at the moment.

We have used ADmitMac earlier, but since there are way more resources and documentation for Apple’s AD plugin, we will make the switch with Snow Leopard. Together with MCX via an extended AD schema, it looks like a killer combo. With Apple’s AD plugin you can also easily change the local admin groups for each client using the dsconfigad command – something which is not possible with ADmitMac (according to the support guy from Thursby I talked to on the phone). This makes it super easy to i.e. control/change what groups that should be allowed to be local admin and have remote access (ARD), with authentication via Active Directory (or Open Directory).

In addition we see issues with migrating from ADmitMac to Apple’s AD plugin + ExtremeZ-IP at a later time. Uninstalling ADmitMac must be done manually, and getting rid of all the ADmitMac cruft seems harder than expected.

Going with Apple’s AD plugin and Thursby DAVE, we are free and open to switch to any other/better solutions when ever they appear.

Just wanted to share some of my thoughts.

[skeleton_key]

Hi,

I know this is an old thread, but I just came across it and I was wondering if thomasb ended up moving to Apple’s AD plug-in for authentication & DAVE for a CIFS client. If so, how did it work out? Are you satisfied with DAVE? The project I’m working on now doesn’t involve DFS, but it requires users to use CIFS shares hosted by an EMC Celerra NAS and we’re looking for a better CIFS client than MOSX’s built-in tool.

Thanks!

[thomasb]

Still evaluating both products actually. Both have bugs at the moment, but DAVE works best in terms of DFS in the environment we have at work.

STAY AWAY from DFS if you possibly can. It is at the moment a really painful experience in Snow Leopard, as there are no rock solid solutions for the Mac yet.

In your case, I would much rather go for GroupLogic’s ExtremeZ-IP to get proper AFP sharing, than DAVE to get a better CIFS-client.

Here are some benifits: [url]http://www.grouplogic.com/products/extremeZ-IP/?fa=smb-cifs-comparison[/url]

DAVE does support ACLs, but does not currently display ACLs in Finder or in the Terminal (there is also an annoying bug caused by Finder if you use DAVE for DFS: [url]http://www.thursby.com/support/faq/?id=602[/url]).

You might find this information interesting:

Will ExtremeZ-IP work with a NAS or a SAN?
[url]http://support.grouplogic.com/?p=1687[/url]

Maintaining Native Mac File Sharing in an Enterprise Storage Environment
[url]http://www.grouplogic.com/resource-center/pdfs/Maintaining-Native-Mac-File-Sharing-in-an-Enterprise-Storage-Environment-A-Technical-Best-Practices-White-Paper.pdf[/url]

[skeleton_key]

Thanks, thomasb.

I’m a big fan of ExtremeZ-IP and it was the first thing I suggested, but in this case the customer really wants to use the Celerra as a NAS for file storage. I suggested using the Celerra as an iSCSI target to provide storage to a Win2K8 VM running ExtremeZ-IP, but they’d rather not change their storage config so drastically for a small # of Macs at this time. I really wish MOSX included a better CIFS client. Again, thanks for your input.

[eekaboig]

bot thinks i’m spam wont let me post

[eekaboig]

hi everyone,

I’m new to the mac world but have worked in IT for the past 10 years. i currently work for a medium sized university and we are trying to integrate macs into our ad environment, and its been quite painful to say the least. So far I’ve tested

[eekaboig]

tested every aforementioned as well as quest and open directory.

[eekaboig]

is there a secret to posting a normal post here?? its as bad as the third party software i’ve been testing…

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