The group I work in at the U has a bunch of Windows users who need to access data on a file server. We were using a Linux file server for awhile, but then I received a very disappointing announcement: "The Linux to Windows server migration will occur tomorrow evening (9/8) at 6:30. Everyone should be logged off their computers by then." I was very surprised by that. It's the first time I've seen anyone go backward from Linux to Windows on a server. There are a lot of reasons why it is a bad idea for us, but there is one good reason why they were doing it: speed. There had been a lot of complaints about how slow the Linux system was in serving files to the Windows desktop clients. An IT group leader said that because CIFS (what used to be SMB) is proprietary and the Samba people have to reverse-engineer it, they can't squeeze everything out of it that a native Windows system can, or something to that effect. One of our guys ran some tests and showed that the Windows file server is clearly faster. I wonder what happened. It doesn't seem like so many years ago that speed tests comparing a Linux file server (running samba) to a Windows file server showed that Linux was a lot faster. Of course, Microsoft wouldn't have liked that and maybe they were able to mess something up on the client end in later versions of Windows. It seems like the problem is especially bad for SPSS users on Windows connecting to data files on the server. This must be a very common problem. Have any of you run into it? Do you have a fix for it? I found this: http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/windows-client-cifs-behavior-can-slow-linux-nas-performance/ Maybe that was our problem. I'll have to see what the filesystem was. If switching to XFS can fix the problem, maybe we should do that instead of returning to Windows server. I also found this: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/samba-4-now-due-in-2011-smb2-and-smbcifs-protocol-docs-done/6810 Does anyone know what's up with Samba 4? Is it being used now? Maybe that would be a better option than the CIFS we've been trying to run. Mike