using samba and smbfs as a replacement for nfs ?

[Gavin]

Hello Urban,

my comments inline ..

Urban Widmark wrote:

> 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.
>

That is what i don't know, i was hoping someone on the list might have a clue.



>
> 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
>

I will see if i can grab 2 computers and do a benchmark .. when i have some
numbers i will post them to the list.

As for my / our needs .. i need file locking .. so i guess i will have to use
the knfsd implementation on Linux.
Thanks for the helpful info.

Cheers

Gavin Woodhatch

>
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