[TriLUG] Monitoring Samba Bandwidth?

[Kevin Flanagan]

SMB across the WAN is pretty common on bigger networks.  We have ~50
people in the building, and the file servers are in a data center to the
east about 40 miles.

Managing it, now that's another matter entirely, not one that our
nestwork folks do well.  SMB across the internet, now that's bad.

I would agree that monitoring by port is the best way to go.  Especially
if you have a management solution in place, if you're small, you could
do something that brings things together, Big Brother for monitoring
systems, and something else for bandwidth utilization.

Another approach is to do NFS over the WAN, not a lot better, but could
be, Services For Unix (SFU) from Microsoft is free, and you can do user
name mapping of Windows users and groups to UNIX users and groups. 
Perhaps you are more comfortable with NFS, I know that many folks are. 
Besides, it's a smaller target for attacks, everyone loves to attack
"Microsoft protocols" not too much attention to NFS, at least you
wouldn't be as likely to propagate viri.




Just my $.02,


    Kevin 

On Thu, 2004-09-16 at 10:47, Joshua Gitlin wrote:

> Jason,
> 
> Yes, running smb across the WAN is odd. ;) However, it works... I also 
> run FTP/SFTP, WebDAV, SSH (of course) and I used to run Netatalk... I 
> strongly prefer people use SFTP or scp for file transfers, and WebDAV 
> second to that... but this guy specifically asked to "map a network 
> drive under windows" and Samba was the only tool I was aware of that 
> could do that. From my brief research, the passwords are not very well 
> encrypted when they are sent across the net (can anyone confirm/deny 
> this?), but then again, FTP passwords aren't encrypted at all... so... 
> Probably not the most effective or secure solution, but it's what I'm 
> being paid for ;)
> 
> What is fish?
> 
> -Josh
> 
> 
> On Sep 16, 2004, at 9:48 AM, Jason Tower wrote:
> 
> > i don't know about monitoring by process, but monitoring by port number
> > should be possible.  with samba that would be ports 137-139,
> > check /etc/services for a complete list.
> >
> > so, you're running smb across the wan?  that sounds...odd.  99% of the
> > time smb is used only on a lan, there are probably better methods for
> > sharing files across the net.  ftp, http, fish, and so on.  take a look
> > at http://bytehoard.org/ as well.
> >
> > jason
> >
> > On Thursday 16 September 2004 09:37, Joshua Gitlin wrote:
> >> Hey TriLUG,
> >>
> >> I just installed Samba on a server for a potential client looking for
> >> a custom hosting solution. He wanted his employees to be able to map
> >> network drives under windows from any location, but didn't want to
> >> have to deal with managing a server... so Samba seemed to me to be
> >> the best (or maybe the only?) option. Anyway. I have a limited amount
> >> of bandwidth on this server, and I sold this guy a specific portion
> >> of that... trouble is, I don't know f any way to monitor the
> >> bandwidth that just one process uses... or any way to break down the
> >> bandwidth on my server by process... much less any way to limit the
> >> amount of bandwidth that the Samba server can use, or even limit the
> >> amount of bandwidth his specific user can use... ANy thoughts on how
> >> to do any of these things?
> >>
> >> Thanks Guys!
> >>
> >> -Josh
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