[Samba] Question regarding permanent mounts

[Denis Cardon]

Hi Michael,

> we set up a Samba AD with a dedicated fileserver in a heterogeneous
> Windows/Linux environment and face a problem right now: we have a few
> additional servers used by everyone for doing "heavy" computations.
> There, we'd like to mount a folder for sharing between a special group
> of users; so it should be mounted permanently. My questions are:
>
> - How can we achieve this?
>   - Using cifs, is it possible to use a machine account for mounting and
> mount the share when booting?

machine account is mostly a standard account and you can use it to mount 
a share and read and write from it (given you setup the correct ACLs of 
course). For instance when a windows workstation boots up, it uses its 
machine account to connect to sysvol share to copy its GPOs in its local 
cache.

You'll probably need to have samba put the keytab in a dedicated file 
(see "kerberos method" parameter) and then you can use it in your mount 
options. You'll have to be careful about the automatic refresh of the 
computer account by Winbind if it runs in the background.

>   - Using nfs, is it possible to use the Samba Kerberos service?

nfs might be your best option if you need posix semantics. Otherwise 
you'll be stuck with SMBv1 and it does not scale well. Indeed smb posix 
extension are not yet implemented in smbv2 or v3.

If you don't need posix semantics, be sure to use SMBv2 or SMBv3 between 
your computation server and your file server to get better performance.

Cheers,

Denis

>   - What's the "best" solution to achieve the goal ;-) ?
>
> I'm looking forward to your suggestions. Regards
> Michael
>
>

-- 
Denis Cardon
Tranquil IT Systems
Les Espaces Jules Verne, bâtiment A
12 avenue Jules Verne
44230 Saint Sébastien sur Loire
tel : +33 (0) 2.40.97.57.55
http://www.tranquil-it-systems.fr