Assistance Required (FreeNAS Newbie!)

[Kevin Gutteridge]

I have a need for a NAS that will hold fairly static data for a small number (less than 5) occasional users and thought that a virtualised copy of FreeNAS was the answer to my problem (yes, I have read the warnings about virtualisation, but I can easily transport this setup onto other offsite hardware for DR purposes). The issue I am having seems to be connected to Samba’s AIO feature and reported by a number of people but I am yet to find a solution or confirm this. Whenever I start a copy running, it will randomly stop and report either – An unexpected error occurred or The specified network location is no longer available.

My installation is as following:
VMWare 5.1c
HP Proliant DL380p Gen8 2 x 2.5Ghz / 6 cores each and 64Gb RAM.
HP LeftHand iSCSI Storage.
FreeNAS-9.2.1.8-RELEASE-x64 (e625626) ( 2 x CPU / 8Gb RAM), 1 x 8GB Disk (O/S) 3 x 2TB (Configured as one volume), 1 x Ethernet (E1000)
1 x NFS Share
1 x SMB Share

Clients Tested
Windows XP
Windows 7
SuSE OES Linux

In the above scenario, I can copy to the NFS share with no issues from my SuSE Linux server. This machine is physical and the network is a single segment connected via a HP Procurve 4208GL (Gigabit). No are no bad/dropped packets and I am can repeatedly copy 100 GB of data onto the share with no issues.

Copying from either the Windows XP or Windows 7 machine, regardless of file size (I had read the AIO issue was related to large files), always results in an error. The error seems to occur randomly. Both of these physical machines are connected via the same HP Procurve as above and again no bad/dropped packets are being reported.

In attempting to track this down, I’ve also installed FreeNAS onto a second VMWare vSphere:
VMWare 5.5
Dell Poweredge 2950 2 x 2Ghz / 4 cores each and 32Gb RAM.
Internal Storage
FreeNAS-9.3-STABLE-201412090314 (2 x CPU / 8Gb RAM), 1 x 8GB Disk (O/S) 2 x 2TB (Configured as one volume), 1 x Ethernet (E1000)
1 x SMB Share

Clients Tested
Windows 7
Windows 8

In this second setup, there is no other significant load on the vSphere (1 x Domain Controller and the FreeNAS) and the network is exclusively used by the two client machines. I believe that AIO support has been disabled in the 9.3 release, so maybe this is not the cause of my troubles.

Both scenarios have been joined to a domain successfully and authentication is working as expected. They were both out of the box installations, but I have experimented with various Samba options in an attempt solve this, my current smb4.conf is below:

[global]
server max protocol = SMB3
encrypt passwords = yes
dns proxy = no
strict locking = no
oplocks = yes
deadtime = 15
max log size = 51200
max open files = 32743
load printers = no
printing = bsd
printcap name = /dev/null
disable spoolss = yes
getwd cache = yes
guest account = nobody
map to guest = Bad User
obey pam restrictions = Yes
directory name cache size = 0
kernel change notify = no
panic action = /usr/local/libexec/samba/samba-backtrace
server string = NAS Server 01
ea support = yes
store dos attributes = yes
hostname lookups = yes
acl allow execute always = true
idmap config *:backend = tdb
idmap config *:range = 90000000-100000000
server role = member server
netbios name = [REMOVED]
workgroup = [REMOVED]
realm = [REMOVED]
security = ADS
client use spnego = yes
cache directory = /var/tmp/.cache/.samba
local master = no
domain master = no
preferred master = no
acl check permissions = true
acl map full control = true
dos filemode = yes
winbind cache time = 7200
winbind offline logon = yes
winbind enum users = yes
winbind enum groups = yes
winbind nested groups = yes
winbind use default domain = no
winbind refresh tickets = yes
idmap config [REMOVED]: backend = rid
idmap config [REMOVED]: range = 20000-20000000
allow trusted domains = no
template shell = /bin/sh
template homedir = /home/%D/%U
pid directory = /var/run/samba
smb passwd file = /var/etc/private/smbpasswd
private dir = /var/etc/private
create mask = 0666
directory mask = 0777
client ntlmv2 auth = yes
dos charset = CP437
unix charset = UTF-8
log level = 10
use sendfile = no
min receivefile size = 16384
keepalive=60
max mux=200

[Share1]
path = /mnt/Volume1/Windows01
printable = no
veto files = /.snap/.windows/.zfs/
comment = Data
writeable = yes
browseable = yes
recycle:repository = .recycle/%U
recycle:keeptree = yes
recycle:versions = yes
recycle:touch = yes
recycle:directory_mode = 0777
recycle:subdir_mode = 0700
vfs objects = zfsacl streams_xattr aio_pthread
hide dot files = yes
guest ok = no
nfs4:mode = special
nfs4:acedup = merge
nfs4:chown = yes
zfsacl:acesort = dontcare

I’m totally out of ideas with this now, can anyone help please!