SMB woes.

Hello. My company is having major problems with SMB transfer speeds
between QNX and NT.

We have four QNX 4.25E machines attached to an NT 4.0 machine. The NT
machine shares five directories via SMB, named ‘common’, ‘sts1’, ‘sts2’,
‘sts3’, and ‘sts4’. Each of the four QNX machines mounts the
appropriate ‘stsx’ directory and the ‘common’ directory; that is,
‘common’ is mounted four times, while each ‘stsx’ directory is mounted
once. Periodically, the QNX machines load a fairly large amount of data
off of the ‘common’ share (and a significantly smaller amount off of the
‘stsx’ shares). During most of the time, the shares aren’t actually used.

The ‘common’ directory contains information that is common to all of the
QNX machines (they are running a driving simulator; the NT machine runs
the user interface). There are a handful of subdirectories within
‘common’, and none of those contain more than 260 files.

The problem: the longer the systems are left running, the slower the
data transfer gets until the QNX machines begin taking too long to get
all of their data and our software shuts down (there is a time limit).
Rebooting the NT machine will often temporarily improve the transfer
speed; unplugging the ethernet cable sometimes helps, but not always.

Has anyone else seen these kinds of slowdowns? If so, are there any
workarounds?

My next thought was to try a full-blown Samba installation. However,
I’m not sure this will buy me anything. Does anyone have any general
advice on how to handle this? That is, other solutions for sharing data
transparently, or nearly so, between QNX and NT?

Thanks for any thoughts on this matter.

Josh Hamacher
FAAC Incorporated

Ping.

We’re using SMBfsys 1.30I, dated Dec 07, 1999 (file size 102228 bytes).
Is there a newer version available?

Also, is it possible to get the source code for SMBfsys, either
no-strings-attached or under an NDA? It seems as if it would be
possible to write a resource manager wrapper around the samba smbclient
source code; I’m wondering if that’s how SMBfsys works.

Josh Hamacher
FAAC Incorporated