Server File Sharing unstable on mac and windows network on Mavericks and OSX Server 3.0

Hello!

After the weekend we started testing with our testing server - no change at all 😟

An app started from a smb-share still crashes randomly.

... because I don't believe in a "fast fix" from Apple my dead line forces me to change my customers to Windows Server - very very sad 😟

Why would you like to start a App from a share. App's are made to run local not from a share.

I didi not tune anything i always use a system as it is. Because of stabilty is more importend than speed.

Hello Patrick!

I speak about a commercial dentist management software that was running on Mac OS X since 10.0 and until Apple removed Samba with 10.7 and since that time smb is buggy. I hopped that with Mavericks the problems are gone but they are worse.

BTW: your comment is not really helpful. It is like "You have a problem with a computer, well why don't you use paper instead?".

I have constraints that did not allow any changes in the way the app is installed. And the bug can not be fixed by the third party software manufacture - it is a bug in Apples smbd.

The software just installes a Postgresql database and needs reliable access to an AFP share (this part works) or for Windows clients to a SMB share (this part does not work), that's all. Actually nothing complicated but to much for Mavericks :-(.

And we have to replace 10.6.8 servers with new servers until the last of july - what do you think should I use? A buggy Mavericks server or a working windows server?

thanks, bye

Christoph

P.S. I filed a new bug report - 16956654

SMB in Mavericks is not Samba, it's Apple's SMBX, Apple was forced by Samba's adoption of GPLv3 to drop the use of Samba. See:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3206725?answerId=15892224022#15892224022

Postgresql is included and used extensively for services in Mavericks server as you probably know.
But if your third-party product doesn't work with Apple's SMBX, yes I would not wait for a fix from Apple. It's no small deal to be forced to drop Samba and have to reinvent that wheel completely.

With a Windows server you will need ExtremeZ-IP to provide AFP file-services, but I suggest testing first to see if Apple Mavericks client -> Windows SMB filesharing will work acceptably.

Great answer Davidh, smart and generous people like you are not easy to come about...

One question I have is: wouldn't SMBUP fix Chris' issues?

I don't know, and I doubt SMBUP has any magical ability to better handle cross-platform file-locking.
I know its often popular here to denigrate Apple, but honestly, some anyone hoping for a chimerical one guy as super-hero and SUPER-supreme-knowledgeable-fixer-of-all-bad-Apple-things, in contrast to the team of surely well-experienced engineers/coders at Apple is a flight of fancy.

Maybe SMBUP is a good option for some people. Does it fully integrate with Open Directory ?

SMBUP does not integrate with OD as far as I know, but I just did some superficial reading about it when I realized that 10.9 was not ready for a full multi-platform business environment with file sharing. I believe I read that it was a fork of Samba and had to be configured as such. I heard some people saying that Samba can be integrated to OD environments, but I never been there...

Here is more info: http://eduo.info/apps/smbup

I used SMBUP with 10.8 (I've been having a lot more luck with 10.9 and Windows clients than others here, but 10.8's SMBX was completely unusable on my network).

As for how well it works, it is Samba, so it works as well as well as Samba. It offers access to the full configruation options for Samba, and therefore can be configured to do more or less anything you could get done under 10.6 Server. Once I got it configured (which took a bit of work, since a lot more options are exposed), it was solid and seemed to work fine.

On the down side, no, it does not integrate with Open Directory. It uses its own user database. Which for a network with any significant user management is a total deal breaker. I only have to support a few Windows clients, so it was workable to add those users again to the Samba server, but that wouldn't be realistic for a larger userbase. SMBUP does offer some user management tools that are supposed to make it easy to select existing OD users to add to Samba, but the version I was using (not sure if it's been updated since then) the UI was very flaky; once added users had a tendency to simply not show up in the list at all, although they were still functional and I could of course modify the database directly if I wanted.

Hypothetically I suppose there might be a roll-your-own integration solution, but you'd have to be pretty dedicated to try and get that working.

Bottom line being SMBUP is a very easy way to replace SMBX with Samba, but don't expect the user management tools to work as well as Apple's built-in Samba.

Wonder if a script to read from OD and write to SMBUP config file (smb.conf) wouldn't be possible. It's above my pay grade, but may be a good idea...

Have you tried this also?

http://blog.helloyama.com/post/77813860132/replacing-the-os-x-10-9-mavericks-smb -stack-with

Server update! It resolved my specific Profile Manager on our colaboration server (wiki, calendar, contacts, pro. man.) issue with invitations, that was a 6 month old ticket wit Apple Enterprise support!!!

Not gonna risk the file server YET...

Been running well on 13D55 and 3.1.1

No SMB issues on our internal ticketing system...

I just wanted to add I am having this problem too, with a few additional variables and data points:

1. Mac Pro is being used as server.

2. Windows 8.1 running on Macs using Parallels. (No actual Windows machines.)

3. Mac side has no server issues.

4. Windows side has frequent permissions issues with Filemaker Pro and AutoCAD locking files such that a user cannot open a file they closed a moment ago, or, a user creates a file, and someone else can't access it, or someone else does access it, and the original user cannot access it again.

5. A constant stream of smbd errors in the console:

5/20/14 5:02:09.825 PM smbd[260]: File system does not support 0X40000, file attrs

I'm about to try turning off SMB2/3 on the Windows clients. Also, I noticed that our Parallels configuration has changed over time, and some users are using the Network in Shared mode, and others are in Bridge mode. I plan to make all users Bridge mode.

We are running Server 3.1.1 and Mavericks 10.9.3. Some users are still on Mountain Lion, and some are on Mavericks. This seems to have no bearing on who experiences the problem, although it seems that one of the Mavericks users is more likely to cause other users to be locked out after opening a file.

I'll report back here if I make any progress, but I hope these notes will help someone who is trying to analyze possible causes of this issue.

Please note that Filemaker has its own built-in sharing/serving mechanism, and you should NOT be opening FM files over the network via AFP/SMB, since time eternal Filemaker has been designed so that one should setup built-in FM sharing and access it that way. If you open a Filemaker file directly over the network while someone else is using the built-in Filemaker sharing, you can and will corrupt that FM file in a hurry.

Disabling SMB2/3 is reportedly helpful.

"Local Network Users" are Open-Directory accounts vs local-only (at the PC in question) accounts.
For file-sharing purposes you want all users connecting to shares to be Network User accounts, and they should not be a member of the POSIX group (eg: admin) for a sharepoint but added as an ACL (just add a group in addition to the one that shows up by default).

Have you tried perfmode setting? refer: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5359

This setting is available for Server V3 on Mavericks.