Is SMBX on 10.8.2 ready for primetime?

I have just installed the OSX 10.8.2 server for my client. A small company with 2 windows 7 users and 5 mac users.

The windows users have BIG problems with filetransfer over SMB. Basically the server is usless for them right now. When they copy larger files, maybe 300-1000MB the copy always gets to an error where it states that it has lost connection and cant copy some file. The copy hase to be abortend and when you try to copy something small, the copy is fine, so nothing wrong with the connection, then when you try to copy a larger file after that, the copy gets aborted again. This just happens over and over.

This is a disaster for my client and a disaster for me since I have sold a solution, that hase worked great on earlier versions of OS X server, that now is useless for my client.

I will try to install SMBup and see if that works, but I am not sure if it works alongside AFP running on the OSX server. Also, what happens with ACL and things like that. But right now I have no choie, I will problably put many hours, I cant get paid for, for this client and I will try to get this up and running as good as possible.

Not a very happy day to be selling OS X server 😟

So sadly, my advice right now, stay away from mixed enviroments and OS X server!!!

To all, please send a feedback because of the poor SMB performance to Apple by using

http://www.apple.com/feedback/server.html

Issues of blame asside, the SMB implementation in 10.8 is not usable in a production enviroment.

I have learnt this the hard way and am now on the back foot trying to get a working solution rolled out to a client.

The biggest issue is the lack of documentation about the configuration of SMBX and there are no Logs by default. I believe Logs can be enabled via command line, however I have not been able to find this setting - If any one knows please let me know.

The main issue I am having are:

- Programs crashing when they are trying to save files opened and modified from the server. This is happening with large architechtual files (Autodesk Revit, AutoCad) and also smaller documents.

- Very slow file browsing.

- Very very slow file transfer speeds.

- Slow initial connection.

I have set up a test enviroment with clean OS installs and simple network.. same issues.

Im currently researching into installing an open sorce SMB server on to the OS X 10.8 Server. However I really dont want to have to support a custom SMB solution for clients. Im looking at SMBup or MacPorts Samba3.

Does anyone have any updated on configuring the SMBX server to work?

Or has anyone had experience with one of the SMB alternatives, if so which and how successful?

Cheers,

James

> "I believe Logs can be enabled via command line, however I have not been able to find this setting - If any one knows please let me know."

I believe they go to the console so will appear in /var/logs/system.log . To generate more verbose output and have control of where the logs go for a debugging session :

stop the systems normal smb daemon:

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.smbd.plist

start debugging smbd daemon:

sudo /usr/sbin/smbd -debug -stdout

and redirect | tee the output wherever you want .

relaunch standard smbd daemon after aborting debugging daemon:

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.smbd.plist

That should work, but for persistent logging of SMBX, you need to unload (launchctl unload -w as noted) the plist, edit it, and reload.

See

http://www.stanford.edu/group/macosxsig/blog/2011/08/enable-logging-with-107-smb x-w.html

"If you want to review logs, you'll have to edit the launchd item. Add the two extra ProgramArgument keys in bold below.

sudo vi /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.smbd.plist

...

<key>ProgramArguments</key>

<array>

<string>/usr/sbin/smbd</string>

<string>-debug</string>

<string>-stdout</string>

</array>

Now you can use syslog -w to review your logs in Terminal in real time."

Thanks for this. I'm wondering if people are seeing similar issues with Mountain Lion Desktops connecting to Server 2008 R2? I'm seeing some permissions issues that I think are related to opportunistic file locking but I'm not sure. Also, some intermittent slowness on seeing directory structures.

OS X 10.9 Mavericks has better SMB support with SMBX 2, mainly because the Mac mini server is all over the place in small firms. We'll have to wait and see but if it's what people are saying online we can finally throw out our old windows server, or so i keep hoping. It has been on its last legs for 3 years now 🙂