Make SAMBA More Reliable

[House Of Cards]

I've been using NFS for years, and can count the failed transfers on one hand.  Ever since switching to UnRAID and SAMBA, file transfers randomly fail saying they could not write to the location mid-transfer, etc...

 

Is this just a "SAMBA sucks" kinda thing, or is there any tweaking that can be done to improve the reliability? 

[Squid]

FWIW, I have never had a SMB transfer fail when using default settings.  Never used NFS once.

[House Of Cards]

20 minutes ago, Squid said:

FWIW, I have never had a SMB transfer fail when using default settings.  Never used NFS once.

I wouldn’t rule out some random thing specific to my setup.  I’ve been known to break stuff.  🤣🤣

 

I’m copying things from my old TrueNAS over to UnRAID.  I’m doing it from my laptop which runs MX Linux, and I notice just before the transfer fails the transfer speed drops completely to zero.  Sometimes retry works, sometimes I gotta skip that file to recover.

 

Could be anything, really.  UnRAID is at the default settings for samba.  I just now decided to dig down this rabbit hole.  Because I have no real experience using samba, I wasn’t sure if this was common…

[House Of Cards]

I know I have seen something about making sure the UnRAID server is always the master, and I have a mix of OS's in my house.  Since the failures are totally random, I almost feel like this is related to changing Samba configurations messing things up.

 

Are there issues with customizing the Samba settings on UnRAID?

[House Of Cards]

On 5/20/2023 at 10:39 AM, Squid said:

FWIW, I have never had a SMB transfer fail when using default settings.  Never used NFS once.

 

Is there any downside to adding this to UnRAID's Samba settings?

 

[global]
    domain master = yes
    preferred master = yes
    local master = yes
    os level = 255

 

Just to make sure the UnRAID server is always "in charge"....

[bonienl]

These settings actually relate to netbios and are okay to use.

You need to enable netbios to make this work.

There are a number of downsides using netbios:

• netbios is not secure
• netbios does not support ipv6
• netbios uses broadcast, this doesn’t work over remote tunnels, like wireguard or tailscale

 

[House Of Cards]

Oh, okay...  Thanks for reminding me these weren't Samba specific.  It's been a while since I dealt with anything other than NFS.

 

I'll leave well enough alone then...