Hey all,

I'm having a problem with Samba - I have a laptop that runs 2008.1 RC2 and my main desktop that runs Windows Vista. All my media is housed on the Vista box. On my Mandriva laptop I am able to see the Vista shares with no problem; I am able to mount the shared folders with no problem. Actualy accessing and using the shared files though is horribly unreliable. When copying larger files (a few hundred megs) to or from the Vista box from the laptop about 75% of the time the transfer will stall and not complete. When trying to play movie files housed on the Vista machine from the laptop sometimes it will work perfectly, othertimes it will just load the first frame of the movie and not actualy play (this happens all players I've tried, Totem, mplayer, VLC).

Since I can see, mount, and access the shares on the PC it appears that Samba is working properly, I'm just trying to figure out why that connection is so unreliable and what, if anything, I can do to make it better.

Does anybody have any ideas?


[moved from Networking by Greg2 – Welcome aboard. ]

The fact that you are able to make the connection and start the transfer suggests that it's not a Samba problem. It sounds more like a wireless network problem.

Are you using a wireless network? Does your laptop have an RJ45 ethernet port? If it does, try connecting both machines to your router with ethernet cables to see if you get good transfers. If you do, then you'll know the problem is the wireless connection.

You are quite right. It worked flawlessly when wired. Problem is with the wireless. Prior to installing Mandriva my laptop ran XP and the wireless performed perfectly so the problem must lie with Mandriva's wireless implementation. I'm using a Broadcom 43xx based card so I'm thinking that it's probably the wireless driver that's the culprit. I used the built in driver with firmware I extracted with fwcutter.

Anything I can do to improve this short of trashing the 43xx card and buying one that is better supported?

You could try to use firmware from a different source, sometimes it helps. You can also try using the windows driver with ndiswrapper... that may work better for your card?