FreeBSD, Samba and OSX clients

[Philip Murray]

Hi,

I have a problem with MacOS X clients (all 10.3.8) accessing a Samba 
server on FreeBSD (RELENG_5). Transferring files will often occur very 
very slowly, usually between 170k/sec-32k/sec.

This doesn't happen with a Windows or Linux server and likewise if the 
clients are Windows or Linux. The version of Samba also seems to have no 
effect. NFS performance is fine, as is iperf doing a TCP test. The 
machines are all connected on a 100Mb/sec switched network.

I've tried toggling various net.inet.tcp sysctls to see if any make a 
difference (delayed ACKs, SACK etc), but nothing seems to have any 
effect. Any ideas on how I can further debug this? is there something 
obvious that could be wrong?

I tried doing a tcpdump, but I couldn't really make enough sense of it 
to know if there was something wrong.

Thanks in advance.

Phil Murray
pmurray at nevada.net.nz