using samba and smbfs as a replacement for nfs ?

[Urban Widmark]

On Wed, 28 Feb 2001, Gavin wrote:

> I have a few Application Servers, and i want them to store all there
> information on one central data server. One way is using nfs, but as i
> have read the implementation on linux could be better, and write
> performance is pretty bad.

What makes you think smbfs has better performance than nfs?
Samba and smb perhaps, but I doubt smbfs is better or even good.

I think samba/smbfs is a bad idea to connect 2 unix machines.

Using samba and smbfs means that you will map unix ideas (permissions,
file locking which smbfs does not yet implement, ...) to their windows
counterparts, and then back to unix again. You are going to lose
information there and you may run into problems.


As for stability. smbfs before 2.2.18/2.4.something could crash your
machine or possibly even corrupt random pages of memory if you nested
directories too deep.
(One way to do this is to have a symlink pointing to '.' on a samba server
 and then do 'find /', the symlink represents an infinitly deep directory
 hierarchy)

Problems are being fixed, but I suspect nfs is significantly more stable
since it is more used and more people are working on it.


It shouldn't be too difficult for you to set up two boxes and test smbfs
vs nfs performance. http://www.iozone.org/ is one benchmark tool. I
haven't tested that myself but I plan too. I'd be surprised if nfs didn't
beat the *--*- out of smbfs.

/Urban