HP CIFS Server 3.0d Administrator's Guide version A.02.02 (Edition 5)

Installing and Conﬁguring the HP CIFS Server

Other Samba Conﬁguration Issues

Chapter 240

To counteract the possible performance impact, you can control how

often Samba scans for changes in the directories it has been requested to

monitor. The parameter that controls how often Samba scans for changes

is Change Notify Timeout. The parameter value represents the number

of seconds between the start of each scanning cycle. The default value is

60. So, if your system takes 55 seconds to complete the scan of all the

directories with Change Notify requests, it would be under a heavy load

at nearly all times.

You can increase the Change Notify Timeout value to a larger number to

decrease how often these Change Notify directory scans are done. The

trade off is that your clients will take longer to see that changes were

made in the directories that they have placed Change Notify requests on.

You will have to decide what the right trade-off is: performance loss or

slow updates to client ﬁle browsers.

Special Concerns when Using HP CIFS Server on a

Clustered File System (CFS)

A clustered ﬁle system provides the advantages of a ﬁle system while

addressing the need to have data accessible from multiple systems.

Applications, though, are not necessarily cluster-aware, including HP

CIFS Server. You need to be aware of the following things when using HP

CIFS Server in a Veritas CFS environment:

• CIFS Server running simultaneously on multiple nodes should not

use Veritas CFS to share the smb.conf conﬁguration.

There are operational reasons why multiple nodes should not share a

conﬁguration ﬁle concurrently such a name/IP registration conﬂicts,

etc. Also, sharing an smb.conf ﬁle will likely lead to sharing CIFS

Server system data, increasing the likelihood of concurrent ﬁle

access and the possibility of CIFS Server corruption.

• Beginning with version A.02.02, HP CIFS Server does not start if

another master daemon is sharing the daemon PID ﬁles from

another node over Veritas CFS. (HP CIFS Server has not allowed

multiple master daemons to be started on the same node if the

conﬁguration daemon PID ﬁles are shared on the same node. By

default, PID ﬁles are found in the /var/opt/samba/lock path).

CIFS does this to prevent the problems with sharing the CIFS Server

conﬁguration as discussed above.