We're a primarily Windows-client shop and the data in question requires NTFS/rich ACLs/auditing.

Sounds like the workaround below is to force the client to SMB1. Not our first choice.

We've never even tried Mixed Mode on the underlying file system, BTW. AFAIK, it tries to offer both NTFS and POSIX permissions and honors whatever request came last. Bleh. All volumes/qtrees are either NTFS or unix even if many are served via both SMB and NFS. NetApp does this pretty well, although when moving to 8.3 we did have some pain setting up NFS access to NTFS content, mostly around configuring LDAP to resolve NFS connections to AD users.

I've reached out to our NetApp contacts and opened a support case including a packet trace from a slow connection to an El Capitan machine. Will keep you posted.

Randy

From: Parisi, Justin [Justin.Parisi@netapp.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2015 6:51 PM
To: NGC-tbar-berkcom.com; Rue, Randy
Cc: Toasters
Subject: Re: Slow SMB connections from 8.3 to some Mac clients

Keep in mind – using CIFS and NFS on the same shares doesn’t mean you have to use mixed security style. In fact, I always recommend people pick NTFS or UNIX and stick with it. Mixed security style is a niche configuration and only needed if you have to change permissions from CIFS and NFS clients.

From: <toasters-bounces@teaparty.net> on behalf of Tony Bar <tbar@BERKCOM.com>
Date: Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 9:47 PM
To: Randy Rue <rrue@fredhutch.org>
Cc: "Toasters@teaparty.net" <Toasters@teaparty.net>
Subject: Re: Slow SMB connections from 8.3 to some Mac clients

Randy -

As Scott mentioned, the .DS_Store and Spotlight indexing are both major impediments to performance of network shares under CIFS/SMB with OS X clients.   It may not be the panacea you're looking for, but disabling both w.r.t. network shares is a good practice regardless.

Out of curiosity, unless you're in a mixed environment with Windows & Mac clients is there a reason you're using CIFS instead of NFS?  If you are in a heterogeneous environment and the Mac users aren't collaborating on files regularly with PC/Windows users would it possibly make sense to have your Mac users' directories shared out as both NFS/SMB so that you can work with SMB if you have to but primarily access over NFS?   I qualify that with "regularly" because mixed-mode shares can get painful when you have a lot of files that flip back and forth between NTFS/NFS style permissions, but if the number of files in question is on the small side, it is a perfectly viable way to work. 

On a side note, Windows 8.1+ (including Windows 10) and Server 2012 both have an NFS client option now so you can work with NFS natively if that helps at all.

Anthony Bar
tbar@berkcom.com
Berkeley Communications

On Oct 29, 2015, at 5:07 PM, Scott Eno <s.eno@me.com> wrote:

I see a pretty new Break Fix doc on NetApp’s support site that might be related to your issues.


Environment

Clustered Data ONTAP 8.3

Symptoms

It takes around 1 to 10 minutes to access the SMB/CIFS share from a MAC client.

Cause

Packet trace displays that there is no issue with the controller response times, and the issue is with the client side settings.

The SMB LargeMTU feature allows an SMB client to issue a single request of up to 1MB. Without support for this feature, SMB clients (both Apple and Mac) are limited to 64KB max request size. Windows clients get around the lack of support for this feature by using another Windows feature called pipelining. Pipelining allows an SMB client to issue multiple outstanding requests without waiting for a response.
Apple supports this feature as well; however, they limit their client to just a few outstanding pipelined requests (less than 4 total outstanding requests versus Windows which regularly goes well above that). So despite a lack of support for LargeMTU, Windows clients have a better performance experience on SMB2.x than Apple because they better utilize pipelining, in place of the absence of LargeMTU with clustered Data ONTAP.

Apple Spotlight file indexer is a common cause for slowness in accessing CIFS shares. 

Solution

Perform the following steps to resolve the issue:

• Add nsmb.conf to ~/Library/Preferences/ with the following details:
[default] 
smb_neg=smb1_only
• Set Other-Networks and Static IP address in Network Preference.
• Connect to smb://pathname
Additional settings for improving Mac SMB peformance:

• Exclude network shares from Spotlight searching:
Open System Preferences, Spotlight, and add all the network shares to the exclusion list.
• Disable updating .DS_Store files within network share folders:
Run from a terminal window:
Defaults write com.apple.desktopServices DSDDontWriteNetworkStores true
Two additional settings, Disable ARP requests validation and Revert TCP ACK to compatabilility mode, are also available. 
http://www.sysadminfaq.com/2014/06/mac-os-x-mavericks-finder-slow.html


On Oct 29, 2015, at 7:50 PM, Christopher S Eno <s.eno@me.com> wrote:

"CIFS or SMB" meaning they've tried both "cifs://servername" (SMB1) and "smb://servername" (SMB2+) to mount shares from Macs with lousy results for both?

Is your CIFS share configured to provide any of the SMB3 features like statefull connections, etc.?



On Oct 29, 2015, at 7:38 PM, Rue, Randy <rrue@fredhutch.org> wrote:

You're been hearing from me a lot lately.

We're having trouble with a small but distinct number of Mac users connecting via either CIFS or SMB and getting slow connections, an rsync of a test file shows a transfer speed of 500KB/s. Most of the problem children are older versions but at least one is running El Capitan, the latest greatest. On the clients that have the problem, they have it reliably. Sounds like a workstation issue but we're still hoping to give the users a solution.

Anybody know of any known issues with Macs and CDOT 8.3? Solutions?

Randy




_______________________________________________
Toasters mailing list
Toasters@teaparty.net
http://www.teaparty.net/mailman/listinfo/toasters

_______________________________________________
Toasters mailing list
Toasters@teaparty.net
http://www.teaparty.net/mailman/listinfo/toasters

_______________________________________________
Toasters mailing list
Toasters@teaparty.net
http://www.teaparty.net/mailman/listinfo/toasters