Samba replacing NFS

[Jim Morris]

Jon,

> Can anyone think of a good reason _not_ to use samba in this situation?

Well, the biggest reason *I* can think of is that NFS retains the Unix
permissions and ownership on files that you copy between Linux and the
Sun system.  Using Samba you will lose the Unix persmissions on files
(i.e. you might lose the eXecute bit on a file), as well as the
ownership of the file.  If that is information you need to retain, I
wouldn't use Samba between Unix boxes.

Another reason is that I have personally experienced some problems using
smbfs in  Linux 2.0.35, with the smbmount utility.  In my case, I am
mounting shares from a NT server to the Linux system.  What happens is
that if the NT server is ever rebooted, or network problems occur, the
shares mounted on Linux do not recover. I.e. in order for the files to
be visible again, I have to unmount and remount the shares. And
sometimes I've had operations like a  recursive find or grep command on
a mounted NT share die, when the share was "not really there", and then
I *can't* kill the find or grep, and therefore I cannot do an unmount of
the share (because its in use), and end up rebooting my Linux system in
order to see the NT shares.

I've not seen this kind of strange behaviour with NFS.

That said, I've always been told that the NFS subsystem is one of the
weakest parts of Linux. I.e. it has performance issues, and needs
rework.

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