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Our companys NAS recently died and has now been replaced by a rackserver running Ubuntu. I installed samba3 which authenticates against our active directory. I defined a share for our graphics department which is working with large files (>100MB). We also have several Windows and Linux users that must have access to these files. Windows and Linux users don't experience any problems.

Now here comes the problem: We have several OSX versions (10.6; 10.7; 10.8) which all have problems working with this directory. These problems include:

  • Files vanish. Only in finder, files are visible with other clients and on server. This problem seems random.
  • User does not have permission to read/write random directories.
  • Folders are slow. It takes up to 60 seconds to view the contents of a folder.

Now I have 2 possible solutions, but none of them are satisfying...

  1. Update all OSX clients to 10.8 and solve the problems with 10.8 (I've been trying, but to no avail...)
  2. Use samba3 and netatalk (afp). There are reported problems with file locks and simultaneous use is discouraged.

Any help is appreciated.

Josh
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Gewürzwiesel
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1 Answers1

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I'm not sure about the disappearing files. You might want to switch to AFP for that. I use netatalk running on a FreeNAS server and it works very well. Your mileage may vary.

Regarding slow directory reads, you'll want to disable Delayed ACKs on the Mac OS X clients using:

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

This will dramatically improve SMB performance. To make that command survive a reboot, add to /etc/sysctl.conf the line:

net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

(Create /etc/sysctl.conf if necessary)

For more information see Apple's Discussion Forums or this article. Or Google "Mac OS X samba delayed ack" and you'll see dozens of others suggesting this change.

As for permission problems, what username is everyone using? Can you provide more details about what the issue is? (Including ls -l output from the server and the clients?)

Josh
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  • After further investigation I've found tons of post suggesting setting of delayed_ack to 0. I've set this on our only 10.8 machine and will investigate if the problem reappears. Nevertheless here is a screenshot of one of our folders: [link](http://i638.photobucket.com/albums/uu109/default112/Bildschirmfoto2013-03-18um152359_zps60aae937.png) What bugs me is, that these permission problems are completely random. If you disconnect and reconnect to the server it works fine for some time. – Gewürzwiesel Mar 18 '13 at 14:33
  • Hmmm, the permissions issues are very strange. You might ant to consider using AFP for your Mac clients. – Josh Mar 18 '13 at 14:58
  • The delayed_ack option helped with the speed issues, but files are still disappearing. I dont't want to switch to afp unless I have to... – Gewürzwiesel Mar 19 '13 at 16:08
  • Not sure specifically what to say about the disappearing files, nor the permission issues... sorry! I run both Netatalk and Samba and use both from Mac OS X clients and don't see these issues. if I come up with other ideas I will let you know! – Josh Mar 19 '13 at 20:45