I’m running Jellyfin on a Debian-server in my home, and I have the associated media folders set up as samba shares so that I can transfer any new media from my laptop to the server through Dolphin (KDE file manager).
This has for the most part worked very well (except slow speeds), but I’ve had an issue recently where the files are not copied over properly. This resulted in glitches in for example music files that would stop playback. I checked the checksums of some of these files, and they were different from source. Seems like the glitchy files are missing some data, but at no point were I notified about this. It works fine after I removed the files and transferred again, and now the checksums match.
Is this a common issue with samba, or could it be a sign that my HDD is acting up?
“Is this a common issue with samba” - no.
Samba shuffles rather a lot of data, quite happily. You have not given us an exhaustive description of the shoddy wiring, dodgy switches and wonky configuration that makes up your network. If it was perfect, you would not be posting here.
There is one snag with CIFS (Samba follows MS’s standards and ironically, I think that CIFS is now renamed back to SMB) that I am aware of, so SMB … snag: SMB will indicate that a chunk of data has been received successfully but not that it has been written to disc successfully. NFS will notify that a chunk of data has been written to disc.
The difference is subtle but if there is not a battery backed RAID involved then SMB/CIFS can lose data if the system restarts part way through a write.
Your issue is probably hardware related. Test your network with say iperf3. Have a look at network stats. Don’t rely on cargo cult bollocks - do some investigations. Nowadays we have nearly all the tools as open source to do the entire job - we did not have that 30 years ago. Grab wireshark, nmap, mtr and the rest and get nerdy (or hire me to do it - don’t do that please!)
The network is by no means ideal. I am transferring from a laptop on WiFi to a server on WiFi located some distance from the WAP. If I owned the place I would do a rewire, but for now it’s the best I can do. I think I assumed that there would be error-checking involved when copying. Since following the advice here of using rsync i stead, I have found that files tend to fail in bunches and I need to rerun several times for it to actually complete. Am I right to assume that comes down to packet loss due to poor signal?
This is above my skill level for now, but I’m adding it to my notes to go back to. I have some ambition of upping my network knowledge in the coming year, and being able to do use such tools to troubleshoot would be great.