Blog

Samuel Cabrero and David Disseldorp (both work at Suse and are members of the Samba Team) talked about combining CephFS and Samba at this year's sambaXP 2020. 

Abstract

CephFS and Samba can be combined to provide a highly scalable filesystem which can be accessed from SMB clients such as Linux, Windows and macOS.

This talk looks at Samba clustering features under development, which aim to provide improved availability and performance, with a focus on:

• New RADOS dbwrap backend as an alternative to CTDB
• Fast Client failover with Witness Protocol as an alternative to tickles ACKs

About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"

In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming month. The 19th edition of the international conference on the open source software Samba took place from 26 - 28 May 2020 for the first time exclusively in digital form. Due to the changed event format and the use of an online conference platform, organizer SerNet is able to offer all talks as videos for viewing (link).

SAMBA+ 4.13.3 has just been released by SerNet. Packages for various SUSE and Red Hat platforms as well as for Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu are available now.

For details, please see the release notes for Samba 4.13.3.

SAMBA+ packages and all later versions are available as software subscription. They can be purchased at the SAMBA+ shop, detailed information and prices are listed at https://shop.samba.plus. The subscriptions are managed at our platform OPOSSO (https://oposso.samba.plus). Users can activate their subscriptions here and manage access credentials. The new SAMBA+ packages are included in existing subscriptions.

Sachin Prabhu and Michael Adam (both Red Hat) talked about the importance of testing at this year's sambaXP 2020. They demonstrated setting up an automated testing environment for Samba on Gluster.

Abstract

Testing is an extremely important part of the software development process. Luckily, a lot of the testing work is automated today. Continuous integration (CI) is a buzzword. In Samba, we have come a long way from manually running tests (sometimes) to our own autobuild system enforcing a full run of the test-suite as a push-gate to running various tests in parallel in the gitlab ci system for each merge request.

While testing server client systems like Samba in an automated way is demanding already, testing a cluster is even more complicated and resource hungry. CTDB itself has been tested in isolation with local processes since the beginning, and recently a test-environment has been added to Samba’s selftest that helps test the samba+ctdb stack entirely with local process and socket wrapper. But an automated, periodic test of a samba and ctdb setup on top of a real clustered file system is still missing. One aspect why this is not so easy to implement is the fact that it would usually require a couple of virtual machines to set up such a test cluster.

This presentation introduces a project that we recently started to investigate and work on. It aims to create a periodic test run pulling the latest bits of Samba and Gluster, setting up a cluster and running test suites against it. Errors would be reported to both projects. As compute resources for the test runs, the centos-ci is used. This project provides jenkins-managed bare metal server resources for open source projects to integrate into their CI systems. These servers are powerful enough to run realistic cluster setups in virtual machines. The presentation demonstrates how the centos-ci resources are integrated into this test system. Furthermore, possibilities are explored, how to integrate centos-ci resources as additional runners for Samba’s gitlab CI runners.

(Slides as PDF)

About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"

In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming month. The 19th edition of the international conference on the open source software Samba took place from 26 - 28 May 2020 for the first time exclusively in digital form. Due to the changed event format and the use of an online conference platform, organizer SerNet is able to offer all talks as videos for viewing (link).

The Storage Developer Conference 2020 was – as many others this year – a virtual event. Volker Ledecke and Stefan Metzmacher from SerNet's Samba Team had recorded their presentations for the SMB Agenda Track in advance. These have now been made available to the public.

Volker Lendecke addressed "Samba locking architecture". Lendecke is SerNet co-founder, developer and long-time Samba Team member. His talk is available here: https://www.youtu.be/BJZAta87V28 (link leads directly to YouTube).

Stefan Metzmacher's topic was "Samba Multi-Channel/io_uring Status Update". He works as developer at SerNet and is a member of the Samba-Team as well. His talk is available here: https://youtu.be/IC2OSp3W6mQ (link leads directly to YouTube).

In this "Report from the field" Günther Deschner (Red Hat / Samba Team) and Anoop C S (Red Hat) talk about "Samba clustering with GlusterFS". Their presentation was part of this year's sambaXP 2020.

Abstract

Samba supports building a clustered SMB storage solution using the Gluster filesystem for several years now. While Samba and it’s cluster component CTDB are well established components for SMB clustering, the Gluster filesystem itself needed to adapt in various areas to provide all necessary features.

The talk covers the lessons learned during the process of maturing the Samba and GlusterFS setup and explore the architecture of Samba and GlusterFS in general. Based on support experiences we  point out the importance of sometimes overseen prerequisites in the area of networking and DNS. Driven by customer demands several important performance improvements have been made in the past months. Users of the glusterfs fuse filesystem now can use a new Samba VFS module that provides enhanced guarantees for accessing files within the cluster. It also implements a mechanism to circumvent expensive case folding pathname operations. The older Samba VFS module which consumes Gluster’s gfapi library now uses Samba’s threadpool implementation based on pthreads which lead to significant performance improvements. The presentation concludes with an outlook for the ongoing work related to SMB3 features such as multichannel and transparent failover.

(Slides as PDF)

About the "sambaXP 2020 Retrospective"

In this series we will present recordings of the sambaXP 2020 in the coming weeks. The 19th edition of the international conference on the open source software Samba took place from 26 - 28 May 2020 for the first time exclusively in digital form. Due to the changed event format and the use of an online conference platform, organizer SerNet is able to offer all talks as videos for viewing (link).