I have a handful of mac boxes accessing a share from a remote Windows Server 2003 box over a site-to-site VPN. They are connecting to the share using cifs, authenticating with AD credentials, and performance is absolutely pathetic - think waiting 5+ minutes to open/copy/move shared docs, even small ones <100Kb.
I am relatively new to this situation but it has been ongoing for quite some time before I took over. For some further background, I can access the same files from Windows machines on the same LAN as the Macs as fast as one would expect for the situation. All of these machines are on a Cisco Catalyst switch behind a Cisco PIX firewall (which provides the site-to-site VPN access). Ping responses from Mac boxes and windows boxes to file server are about the same: 6-7ms.
Has anyone experienced problems like this accessing windows shares from Macs? Is this a protocol issue? Thanks for any input.