[GLLUG] Speeding up Network

[Matt Graham]

On Thursday 15 May 2003 21:53, after a long battle with technology, Seth 
Bembeneck wrote:
> It takes for ever for Red Hat 9.0 to connect and show the files on my
> Windows XP Computer. Is there any way to speed it up?

First, figure out exactly what is happening.  You didn't provide much 
information about what's going on.  This is what I think you're trying 
to do, please provide more detail and any corrections:

You open some "Nyetwork Neighborhood"-type application on your Linux 
box.  (What is this application's name?)  You browse to your 'DozeXP 
machine and attempt to connect to an SMB share.  This takes forever for 
unspecified reasons, but you eventually get a valid listing of SMB 
shares available, and you can connect to a share and get a valid 
directory listing, etc.

(Further reading:  http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html .  
Snarky, but full of good advice.)

What happens if you bypass the Nyetwork Neighborhood and just mount the 
SMB share directly, like so?

mount -t smbfs //BORG/SHARE /mnt/borg -o username=USER,workgroup=
WORKGROUP,password=PASSWORD

...this mounts the SMB share called SHARE residing on the 'Doze machine 
BORG, using username USER, workgroup/domain WORKGROUP, and password 
PASSWORD as authentication credentials.  Please note that you have to 
be root to pass parameters to mount in this way, also the directory 
/mnt/borg must exist.  If you're going to use this share frequently, 
create an entry for it in /etc/fstab , then chown /mnt/borg to the user 
who's going to be using this share--then that user can quickly and 
easily mount and umount that share at any time.

This should work almost immediately, then you can browse to /mnt/borg 
using your favorite file manager and do whatever you want.  If you've 
forgotten which shares are available on BORG, do "smbclient -U USERNAME 
-L BORG" for a list.

This approach to mounting SMB shares is faster and less buggy than the 
myriad userspace-only solutions.  The only problem is that browsing a 
nyetwork full of 'Doze machines using smbclient can be a pain.

-- 
  Back in my day, all we had were 0's.  We painted them different colors
  to tell them apart.  Once this started bogging the processes down, we
  switched to naming them.  I still miss Bob.  --skritch on a.f.c (1998)
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see