Re: CIFS improvements/wider testing needed

[VALETTE Eric RD-MAPS-REN <eric2.valette@francetelecom.com>]

Steve French wrote:

>>This makes me *really* wonder how you test your CIFS implementation.  I
>>would bet you use a Linux server with samba and not real Windows servers
>>like Windows 2000 server or Windows 2003 server. I can perfectly
>>understand that for development purpose because you can tarce the both
>>side, then for validation I think using WindoWS NT (Ok Obsolete but
>>still), Windows 2000 server or Windows 2003 server is mandatory.

> There are two big test events for CIFS each year (Connectathon and the
> SNIA CIFS conference) in which all of the major CIFS vendors servers and
> clients (including the Linux cifs client) are tested together.   These
> two events has been the most helpful for me every year as they are for
> many others on the Samba team (lots of Samba server progress also
> happens in these two weeks).   That is the best opportunity (almost the
> only good opportunity) for testing against EMC, NetApp, Adaptec/SNAP,
> AIX FastConnect, and the other NAS vendors - and at each event a few
> client bugs have been fixed or client workarounds for server bugs have
> been added as a result of this testing.   For weekly testing there are
> of course more test environments than mine, and I get feedback from
> those testing against other server versions, but I have a small test
> environment at home and also one at work (there are other unrelated test
> groups that test the version of cifs and Samba before distro releases)
> that I regularly test against.  It would be impossible for one person to
> test against the breadth of servers out there so community testing,
> especially against the less well known servers, is encouraged.  

That is great that such "plug fest" exists and I agree with you that
this is the only way to test compatibility to such scale.

> In my test environment these are tested almost daily as target servers:
> 
> 1) Samba version 3 (current)
> 2) Windows XP service pack 2


Do you have collected any statistics on Windows server market share per
windows version? I would bet 2000 Server is still mainstream with 2003
slowly replacing NT4 in term of percentage now that support is stopped.

Idealy, may I suggest that dayly testing platforms, should match this
real life Winddows server platform distribution.


-- eric