I have disabled time stamps and increased TCP windows previously with no change in throughput. I don't think it is a TCP setting issue, at least I hope not. Maybe the RTT is large enough I didn't set them properly.

Have you check the transfer speed with the share mounted yet?

I have not. My spare time at home has been greatly limited lately but I'm hoping to by this weekend at the latest.

On Linux, you mentioned CPU usage is low. Is this per thread/core number or entire CPU number? Is all core used during transmission?

It tops out around 15% total but I'm not sure if that is at lowest or highest speed. Either way, CPU is nowhere near getting tested.

Ok, i'm working on this now. My linux box isn't resolving shares by name right now since it is on bcast. is it ok to use IP such as "//ip of windows machine/share"?

EDIT: I'm trying to use IP instead of computer name but it isn't letting me access the folder. the windows share requires user/pw and I think the terminal is trying to use "root" as the username instead of the correct username. ARg...

try:

mount -t cifs //windows/share /media/windows_mountpoint -o username=my_user_name,password=my_password

OK, mount command worked. Now how do I test the file transfer? Can I use Thunar for the transfer or does it need to be command line?

YES! Used thunar and transfer speeds are 10.8 MB/s+!!! Thank you so much.

Now what the heck did this do in a nutshell? Mount as CIFS instead of whatever is default?

Also, what is the best way to setup this network? Do I need to setup the linux box as a WINS server and direct all windows machines to it? Does it matter?

My machines are DHCP so this mount command I'm using right now is only temporary. The windows machine also goes on and off a lot so I don't want the mount always connected. Is there a way to set cifs as the default method when mounting a network share through Thunar or something? I'd like to not have to do the command line mount every time I need to send files.

Also, this command only gives me read access to the windows share. how do i get write access?

WINS in a nutshell is a centralized netbios "DNS". linux can not automatically map netbios names to IP addresses so it would be the easiest method vs using a real DNS. Assuming you are using a typical home/SOHO router you could always configure it's DHCP server to provide the same IP for a particular MAC assuming it has that capability.

I do not know if you can change the built in smb client to use mount.cifs.

Check out autofs. It is designed to automatically mount shares on demand.

Try using the options file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777 for read/write access.

If you want to hide the username,password from world view you can use a credentials file.

As I tried to describe in my other posts you are using two different clients to talk to the windows box i.e. mount.cifs vs the file browsers gvfs. gvfs it appears has some bugs.

With WINS setup properly, I should be able to ping a PC by name instead of IP, correct? I know this is possible but not sure what all I need to do so that linux resolves by name instead of IP. My router DHCP is configurable, but I prefer not having static IPs for my own silly reasons.

Just requires a bit more config changes for linux to resolve netbios names to IP. Search for more info.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...-samba-271336/

I have done all that. The win7 box shows up in my wins.dat file. So my WINS server appears to be working but i cannot ping the win7 machine by name, just IP. I have searched and can't figure out what setting I'm missing.

Just make sure all core/thread be involved.