Samba, Mp3 Stream and Wireless

Shiryou · Posted: Mon Jun 14, 2004 9:29 am Post subject: Samba, Mp3 Stream and Wireless

I have a little problem when streaming MP3's over our little internal network. Our server machine is running debian with a samba share. Im attempting to play MP3's from it on my laptop which has a wireless connection. The problem seems to be related to the MTU setting. Mplayer, Beep or XMMS will simply fail to fill its cache. The cache just drops from 100% down to 0% without it being refilled. It results in very jerky play. In fact, it takes a large amount of time actually start playing a track. Under Windows there is no problem. Adjusting the MTU from 1500 down to 500 usually results in better performance but this only works about 25% of the time. Anyone have any ideas pls?

SuperSheep · Posted: Mon Jun 14, 2004 10:35 am Post subject:

A couple of pointers.

What filesystem are you sharing from? I was using Samba to share a FAT32 drive, and that was incredibly slow and unreliable - I had to copy all my stuff off the disk and reformat it as ext3.

Additionally, you could try adding this to your smb.conf:

Shiryou · Posted: Mon Jun 14, 2004 7:40 pm Post subject:

Its ext3. I'll give that line a try and see what happens. Cheers

Shiryou · Posted: Tue Jun 15, 2004 8:31 am Post subject:

Cheers for the headsup. It seems very much to be a phase of the moon thing. Using mplayer you can see how full the cache is as it plays. The annoying thing is the buffer percentage still just tails off to zero. It has plenty of chances to refill but it simply doesnt. I wonder if its something to do with the UDP packets over a wireless connection?

Shiryou · Posted: Wed Jun 23, 2004 10:12 am Post subject:

Any takers? Its giving me a lot of grief. I tried the above line. I reckon this might be something really obvious but i cant figure it out. I tried that line in the Samba config but with no luck. Over a cable it runs fine but over wireless.... no joy. At the moment, Mplayer likes to fill up the cache and play fine but filling the cache to 20% takes forever!

beowulf918 · Posted: Wed Jun 23, 2004 11:08 am Post subject:

If you're running linux on both machines, why are you bothering to use samba? I was trying this same kind of setup a little while ago, and I believe I ran into some similar problems. I switched to nfs instead and have had no problems since.

Have you tried IPTOS_THROUGHPUT? I confess to having no idea what this option enables, though it has a pretty name.

James.

-Craig- · Guru Joined: 03 Jun 2004 Posts: 333

What kind of hardware do you use? Which drivers?

Shiryou · Posted: Wed Jun 23, 2004 2:10 pm Post subject:

Ok, to answer the first question, not all the machines are linux ones. Its just that the samba implementation between the linux machines isnt too hot. Under windows and Winamp, streaming is perfectly fine, even with large videos over a wireless connection. Messing with the MTU occasionally gives some results but not always. I tried that line but no luck.

Im unsure as to the servers specs. Debian with a 2.6.6 kernel atm. the laptop is a dell inspiron 8200 using a netgear MA401 using the Intersil Prism 2 modules (Orinoco and Orinco_cs). Heres the Dmesg: