I was just wondering if any routing/WAN experts could confirm something for me.. Am I correct that by all common conventions of network design, doing SMB-based file sharing over WAN links is a substantial no-no?

A remote campus in our organization wants a department at my campus to do file sharing off of a routine share they are hosting at their campus. I'm not certain if it's actually running on a Windows box or if it's SAMBA on *nix. Regardless, I've been trying to wave a warning flag saying "You don't do things this way." but of course nobody wants to listen to me.

From the end user's perspective, things obviously aren't going to be as snappy as they're used to with their locally hosted mapped drives. What I'm more concerned about though, is that I've read SMB can be extremely chatty and the resulting high PPS can end up consuming inordinate amounts of CPU resources on the routers at either end of the WAN link. Anyone else agree with this?

 

I suggest you do some kind of replication between the remote server and a local server. Let them get the files from the local server.

BTW if you use DFS you can use a common share name for both servers. Depending on what site the user is in will dictate the server that is used to retrieve the file.

 

I'd like to do replication just like you're suggesting. The problem is that the users on both ends will apparently need almost instant access from a worker at one campus to a worker at the other. "I did my changes, now you do yours" sort of thing. Because of this, any waiting for periodic replication is probably not going to fly. DFS almost certainly isn't going to work since the two servers aren't even in the same AD forest.

 

Dropbox?

I understand that you're WAN connected, but wonder if offloading the
change detection/replication to an app vs. the OS might save a lot of
headache?

 

Sharepoint?

 

I have peers that run SMB shares across slow links all the time. SMB itself is a little chatty, but not as bad as IPX/SPX stuff.

Anyway I have seen it work reasonably well for modest use of documents and spreadsheets over links as slow as 1.5Mbit (T1) with 20 users. You should be ok, unless there is encryption occurring on your WAN links like VPN - then you just get too much packet fragmentation and the overhead that comes with that.

 

What about WebDAV? It uses the HTTP protocol and Windows can mount WebDAV shares.

 

Skydrive? Office.com? In cloud online collaboration shit?