News Group Posts

Samba vs. visionfs

From: "Brian K. White" <brian@aljex.com>
References: <20040501233710.A8890@egps.egps.com>
<m9udnaT1UJxK5wnd4p2dnA@comcast.com>
<20040502112705.A3599@egps.egps.com> 
Subject: Re: [jpr@jpr.com: Re: Simple stupid shell script]
Date: Sun, 2 May 2004 14:22:03 -0400
Message-ID: <6vSdnTf5m9zRoQjdRVn-gQ@comcast.com> 

Nachman Yaakov Ziskind wrote:
> Brian K. White wrote (on Sun, May 02, 2004 at 12:36:31AM -0400):
>> Nachman Yaakov Ziskind wrote:
>>> So, vfslockd (the vision FS lock daemon) keeps dying. And when it
>>> does, people cannot print. People that cannot print are unhappy. And
>>> I like happy people. And the Tarantella NGs offer no succor (my
>>> posts are ignored). So, I hit upon solution, or at least a
>>> band-aid(TM): run a cron job every five minutes which does 'ps
>>> -ef|grep lock' and looks for the string 'vfslockd' in the output.
>>> If there, die quietly; otherwise restart vision services (the only
>>> known cure).
>>>
>>> But I don't know how to write shell scripts. :-(
>>>
>>> (And I can't switch this box for Linux, as Linux doesn't run certain
>>> executables I need. And I don't have the skill set to run Samba on
>>> SCO,
>>> even if it *is* legal.)
>>>
>>>
>>> NYZ
>>
>> Are you saying you found this advice somewhere and want to know how
>> to do it?
>
> No, I take credit for the dumb idea. (I've always aspired to be the
> PHB in
> Dilbert: "Ok, here's the solution. Go and implement it.")
>
>> Or are you saying you did it and just wanted to record the work
>> around here for others to find if they need it?
>
> Nope. Actually, I came here with my tin cup, asking for a software
> donation. :-) But, maybe it will help someone else.
>
>> The shell script would look like this (two lines):
>>
>> /usr/local/bin/checkvision
>> ---snip---
>> #!/bin/sh
>> ps -eocomm |grep -q vfslockd || /usr/vision/bin/visionfs start
>> ---snip---
>>
>> the crontab entry would look like this:
>> run crontab -e
>> 1,6,11,16,21,26,31,36,41,46,51,56 * * * * /usr/local/bin/checkvision
>>> /dev/null 2>&1
>>
>> That said, I can't beleive this is really the correct solution to the
>> problem. Something causes vfslockd to die. It should be found and
>> corrected. I'd start with applying any os patches that, uh, apply,
>> and patching visionfs up to the latest version.
>
> Believe it, Brian. I've been scratching to find something better.
> Check
> the Tarantella NG
>
http://www.tarantella.com/newsgroups/thread.php3?name=tarantella.public.vision-family
> particularly my posts of March 8. The latest version of Vision is
> 3.10.911,
> my date of the files is Jan 19 2001. Three years since any fixes. :-(
>
> The base OS is patched up to date. This is just a problem that no one
> cares
> about. SCO's dying and everyone uses Samba, so who cares?
>
> Thanks for your help and suggestions, Brian.

If you want it to work well, and be a supported product from an impeccably
responsive company with free, knowledgeable tech support forever, and don't
mind spending $$, I'd use FacetWin. It's easy to install and use. No I mean
it really is easy. Certain enthusiasts of a certain unix-like OS out there
will try to say anything is easy and if it's hard for you it's must be that
you are just an idiot unworthy to have the root password. :) FacetWin
actually *is* easy, if for no other reason than that even if you don't know
how to do something they will talk you through it and the phone conversation
is usually not long because most things you ever want to do do not take many
steps. Installation is three commands, two to download 2 files and one to
run the install script. adding a printer that is shared from a PC so that it
is a unix printer is one command. sharing a unix printer so that pc's can
print to it is a couple steps, add a line to a file, copy and slightly edit
a one-line script. To add a new directory share, add a line to a file. And
the tech support will help you forever with not just problems but anything,
including simple usage & configuration like adding a share or a printer, and
including bonehead maneuvers where you broke a working setup yourself, and
it's always free and goes on forever. But you really do pay for that up
front. But, it's a silver bullet in the head of problems.

Otherwise, yeah, samba. I've compiled it and used it a few places and
although it's not as effortless to use as facetwin, it's easier (in my
opinion) than visionfs and works better. And much of it's difficulty in
usage is a simple matter of familiarity. Once you figure out a few basics,
it's not really much more difficult than enything else. Using swat can make
it even easier. Then again, just getting swat working is sometimes a
challenge. It's just more "do it yourself" meaning once you can do it, it's
easy. Certainly a lot of people use samba and certainly it's under active
development, but getting help is not like facetwin. A lot of people use it,
and some of them are the helpful sort, and some of those you may find o
newsgroups, and some of them may answer your questions, and some of the
answers may come within 24 hours. But there is no one you can call other
than some consultant and pay him probably the price of one or two facetwin
seats each time you need to call and no way to know if they are really
knowledgeable or if they will take a lot of time figuring something out that
facetwin tech support would just know their equivalent of.

It should also be noted: There is one feature visionfs has that neither
samba nor facetwin has, which is the ability to mount a share from a pc so
it looks like part of the unix filesystem. Samba can do this in linux but
only in linux due to the fact that it relies on special kernel hooks. both
facetwin and samba do have the ability to put & get files and send print
jobs to pc's via a client that works roughly like ftp. Frankly though, I
didn't find visionfs's method for mounting a share very handy and so didn't
actually use it even when I had it. (last time I used it was approximately 5
years ago but I bet that part didn't change)

There is another product called AFPS (Advanced File & Print Sharing) I'm not
sure but I think you have to pay for it, and I don't know how supported it
is, and I don't know if it supports the ability to mount a windows share,
but I do know it's not SMB, it's Netware. To use it you have to install the
netware client on the pc's, which means also installing ipx/spx on them.
I would think the only time you'd ever want to use it is if you already had
an all netware network. If you have a bunch of pc's and the unix server,
then I don't recommend installing netware on all the pc's just to use this
when two good smb solutions exist.

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