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forestclown
Asked: 2011-11-29 19:40:26 +0800 CST

How many folders you can mount on centos from windows shared folder using Samba with CIFS protocol

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Currently I have an interesting problem to solve:

In short I will need to pull custom text application log files from server windows servers (Mixed environment of windows server 2008 / 2003 sp2 64bit) So that all log files are centralized in one location.

The requirements are:

  • I will need to pull log files from windows servers to a CentOS Linux server.
  • I cannot install additional tools, scripts, and etc on those windows servers to push the files out.
  • I cannot change the applications on windows servers to write log files to another destination.

So current I am using the following methods:

  1. Make log folders on windows servers a shared folder.
  2. Mount those shared folders on CentOS linux server using the commmand: mount -t cifs -o username=windows_username,password=windows_userpassword,domain=windows_domain //windows_server_IP/the_shared_folder /mnt/target_folder

My questions are:

  • How many folders you can mount on a single machine?
  • Although all servers sit in the same network, but how will the performance degrade or how it will impact the Linux server if you mount 100 - 200 folders?

Thanks! :)

windows linux mount samba cifs

1 Answers

  1. This isn't an answer to your exact question, but in my experience about mounting network filesystems in general (although I don't have up-to-date experience with smbfs on Linux) is that mounting a lot of network file systems can mean deadlocks in case one of the servers goes gown.

    I would suggest as an alternative to use a userspace SMB client that doesn't actually mount the filesystem on the server, and just download the files you want, such as smbclient, and then script using that rather than going through the OS's filesystem layer.

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