[Samba] VFAT filesystem and large files

[t-wynnychenko at northwestern.edu ()]

Hello
I have used samba for many years, and it worked great (thanks!).
Anyway, I recently decided to add a USB drive to the server.
Currently running 2.6.29.2 linux kernel, debian etch.
samba version 3.0.24
The USB drive is VFAT

I am able to write small files remotely to the USB drive (a few Kb, 10's of Kb) without a problem.
However, whenever I try to write something "larger" (like 1 Mb), the client machine "freezes" for a
while (about 1 minute or so), then returns an error saying the file could not be written.
However, if I look at the share under which the USB drive is mounted, a file exist, however, it is
all "0"'s.
If I log onto the server with ssh, i can cp large files from ext3 drive to the VFAT USB drive
without problems.

I found a post about this somewhere (I can't seem to find it again), which said this was a problem
with the VFAT code, not samba.

I was wondering, is this is the case? is the is a work-around? Basically, is there a way to write
large files via samba to a VFAT USB drive?

thanks

bye - ted

[Frank Van Damme]

Post by t-wynnychenko at northwestern.edu ()
Hello
I have used samba for many years, and it worked great (thanks!).
Anyway, I recently decided to add a USB drive to the server.
Currently running 2.6.29.2 linux kernel, debian etch.
samba version 3.0.24
The USB drive is VFAT
I am able to write small files remotely to the USB drive (a few Kb, 10's of Kb) without a problem.
However, whenever I try to write something "larger" (like 1 Mb), the client machine "freezes" for a
while (about 1 minute or so), then returns an error saying the file could not be written.
However, if I look at the share under which the USB drive is mounted, a file exist, however, it is
all "0"'s.
If I log onto the server with ssh, i can cp large files from ext3 drive to the VFAT USB drive
without problems.
I found a post about this somewhere (I can't seem to find it again), which said this was a problem
with the VFAT code, not samba.
I was wondering, is this is the case? is the is a work-around? Basically, is there a way to write
large files via samba to a VFAT USB drive?

Well, since it works via SSH, it would seem like a weird conclusion
the problem lies with the file system. Samba is only a userspace
program like cp.

That said: vfat means Pain! PAIN!! *PAIN!!!*

The design of the FAT files ystem is maybe 20 or 25 years old. It was
simple and perfect in the days when the average computer had 20 MB
hard drives with 50 files on them. It is not scalable. It is not
suitable for large file systems (and nowadays every new computer comes
with them). It is not suitable for large files. Besides, it's
unreliable and slow. If you're hooking the drive to a Samba server
anyway, just reformat it with a real file system, like ext3.

[t-wynnychenko at northwestern.edu ()]

Hello

I was trying to keep the USB drive as FAT so that I could easily move it a Windows machine if necessary.

anyway, i found the reference (i don't know why i was having trouble last night) -

------
Gerald (Jerry) Carter jerry at samba.org
Thu Aug 24 16:00:45 GMT 2006

When copying large files from my Windows XP machine
to this share, smbd seem to "reserve" (by using ftruncate())
the space needed on the USB disk before actually doing
any copying. This ftruncate() operation takes quite
a while when the file is large. It may even cause the
client to time out.

...

Would you consider this a problem in Samba or in
the VFAT filesystem driver?

IIRC our stance is that it's a problem with the
VFAT driver. This issue has some up before.
------

so, that is more than a year old - is there more information about this at this point. i tried
specifying "strict allocate = no" - but that did not change anything.

thanks
bye - ted

[Daniel O'Connor]

Post by t-wynnychenko at northwestern.edu ()
I was trying to keep the USB drive as FAT so that I could easily move
it a Windows machine if necessary.
anyway, i found the reference (i don't know why i was having trouble last night) -

You could put ext2/3 on it and use this in Windows ->
http://www.fs-driver.org/

I've never tested it though.
--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
-- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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[Frank Van Damme]

Post by Daniel O'Connor

Post by t-wynnychenko at northwestern.edu ()
I was trying to keep the USB drive as FAT so that I could easily move
it a Windows machine if necessary.
anyway, i found the reference (i don't know why i was having trouble last night) -

You could put ext2/3 on it and use this in Windows ->
http://www.fs-driver.org/
I've never tested it though.

I did, and it works great (meaning I did not yet crash my system or
lose any data with it yet). It probably works a lot better then vfat
under Windows too (the fs is just faster). Permissions and ownership
obviously don't work though.

[t-wynnychenko at northwestern.edu ()]

==============Original message text===============
On Sat, 22 Sep 2007 11:49:06 pm +0100 "Daniel O'Connor" wrote:

You could put ext2/3 on it and use this in Windows ->
http://www.fs-driver.org/
I've never tested it though.

===========End of original message text===========

At one point a year or so ago, i mounted a ext2 filesystem on a win2K machine. It did work.
However, the reason I asked about VFAT is I wanted to have a USB drive that could be removed from
the samba server and used on (pretty much) "any" windows/linux computer (without installing/modify
the recipient computer). VFAT gives me that (unfortunately).

thanks
bye - ted

[Daniel O'Connor]

Post by t-wynnychenko at northwestern.edu ()
At one point a year or so ago, i mounted a ext2 filesystem on a win2K
machine. It did work. However, the reason I asked about VFAT is I
wanted to have a USB drive that could be removed from the samba
server and used on (pretty much) "any" windows/linux computer
(without installing/modify the recipient computer). VFAT gives me
that (unfortunately).

Partition it in 2, put the driver on a small FAT partition and make the
rest ext2 :)
--
Daniel O'Connor software and network engineer
for Genesis Software - http://www.gsoft.com.au
"The nice thing about standards is that there
are so many of them to choose from."
-- Andrew Tanenbaum
GPG Fingerprint - 5596 B766 97C0 0E94 4347 295E E593 DC20 7B3F CE8C
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[Rashkae]

Post by t-wynnychenko at northwestern.edu ()
I found a post about this somewhere (I can't seem to find it again), which said this was a problem
with the VFAT code, not samba.
I was wondering, is this is the case? is the is a work-around? Basically, is there a way to write
large files via samba to a VFAT USB drive?
thanks

Hmm, I'm sorry, I don't have any great insights into this problem... I
was wondering, however, if you might have some error message in your
dmesg log of the server when the error occurs? that might be helpful.

btw, usually, and people say large files, they are talking about 2G, or
at least several hundred MB. I think if this is supported at all, you
should be getting more than your 1 KB :)

[Theodore Wynnychenko]

-----Original Message-----
From: Daniel O'Connor

Partition it in 2, put the driver on a small FAT partition and make the
rest ext2 :)

--
-----Original Message-----
From: Rashkae


Hmm, I'm sorry, I don't have any great insights into this problem... I
was wondering, however, if you might have some error message in your
dmesg log of the server when the error occurs? that might be helpful.

---

Hello - I was away for a few days and could not immediately reply.
Anyway. The partition the usb drive into 2 is a good idea, and I may end up
doing that.
However, I was wondering if there is any more info regarding the original
question.
I see no error messages in dmesg, and samba.log only records connections
being opened and closed (no errors).
When I try to copy (say) 223 MB file, after about 1-2 minutes, i get a "The
specified network name is no longer available" message from win2K, and a
file of 223 MB appears on the network USB/VFAT drive filled with zero's (0).
It seems that this (from the prior posts in 2006) -
-----
Gerald (Jerry) Carter jerry at samba.org
Thu Aug 24 16:00:45 GMT 2006

IIRC our stance is that it's a problem with the
VFAT driver. This issue has some up before.
-----
- is a "old" problem with VFAT. I was basically wondering if there was any
updated information about it. If not, that's fine too.
Thanks for the help.
bye - ted