samba-nfs

[David Lee]

On Wed, 6 Feb 2002, Esh, Andrew wrote:

> [ Eli Kleinman had earlier written: ]
> > Is it ok to run samba and NFS on the same machine? 
> > 
> > I want to have a samba share for /data1 and a different NFS mount 
> > point for /data2, can samba and NFS co-exists on the same 
> > Solaris 8 x86 box, are there any known issues? 
> 
> Sure. It works fine. The only issue is if Samba and NFS are serving the same
> file space. The access permission on the files is not easy to represent to
> the users, when representing the settings of the opposite system. If the
> file space is not shared, or if the permissions settings are very simple (as
> most of them are), then there is no problem with this.

What might help you here is Samba's "inherit permissions" option (in
"smb.conf") which, to a first-level approximation, can help loosely
amalgamate UNIX and Windows permission models. 

UNIX and Windows have different models for establishing permissions on new
files and subdirectories (and the detail is very different).  These
approximate to:
  o UNIX: the process umask (ignoring parent directory);
  o Windows: often inherits (approximate, handwave) from parent. 

Samba's "inherit permissions" basically makes it operate in a Windows-ish
inheriting manner, rather than a process driven (umask) one.

(You'll notice that I inserted lots of vagueness there!  That's because
there is much detail missed out; I simply want to concentrate on the major
conceptual difference, and how "inherit permissions" goes some way towards
bridging the gap.) 

We happily run Samba and NFS on the same fileservers.  BUT we urge users
not to try to access the same data at the same time with both mechanisms
(potential locking problems etc.)  Even at different times, user-confusion
can sometimes arise: e.g. UNIX and Windows text files have different
line-ending conventions... 

Hope that helps.


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