frio.name

CIFS in OpenSolaris

Having spent the day toying with getting this working (as part of a larger OpenSolaris NAS project), I’ve finally managed to work my way through a few bugbears and get the box sharing a ZFS share over the network. The guide at http://wiki.genunix.org/wiki/index.php/Getting_Started_With_the_Solaris_CIFS_Service helped immensely, and if you follow it, you shouldn’t run into any issues. Shouldn’t, but…

If you do, here’s a few things I experienced and how to fix them:

• modinfo | grep smb is blank: rem_drv smbsrv and add_drv smbsrv again. Ensure that /kernel/drv/amd64/smbsrv actually exists, and if not, reinstall the CIFS server (pkg install SUNWsmbskr SUNWsmbs).
• The actual server doesn’t run: run svcs -xv to list all the services in a faulted state. See if smb/server is in there. If it is, check the log and see if you’ve got a kernel error (I did!) - if so, see the previous answer and then svcadm clear smb/server (which will clear maintenance mode and restart the service).
• If you can’t login, check that pam.conf still has the SMB line. It seems mine chewed it out after a reboot :/.

Other than all that, it’s working great now. An unscientific comparison transferring files from Vista to the box (Intel Atom 330/2GiB RAM/320GB SATA HDD) saturates the switch at a full 100Mbps. Conversely, the existing FreeBSD setup I had on the same box maxed out at around 40Mbps; I suspect because the FreeBSD driver implementation for the onboard NIC is still quite weak (brand new in 7.1) and because ZFS in FreeBSD is as advertised - experimental.