[Samba] samba (vs. nfs) in all unix environment

[Mariano Absatz]

Hi,

I'm sorry if this is a very FAQ, I've been googling around and searchin' 
the list archive and I'll gladly accept RTFMs with somehow precise URLs 
(including URLs to the list archives).

I'm on the drawing board (no equipment yet) for a server farm that will 
have a SteelEye linux cluster behind to provide (among other services) 
with networked file access.

The setup is all-linux (likely RHEL 2.1, less likely RHL 8.0, almost 
unlikely RHEL 3.0), that is, there will not be no windows clients nor 
servers.

The shared filesystems will be used by a Courier-IMAP server and an 
Apache httpd 2.0 server.

I always did these kind of stuff with NFS and I know it would work, but 
recently someone told me maybe SMB would yeld better performance and 
resilience in case of a cluster node failing over to the other one...

The point is, I don't know anything about this, and searching the web, 
newsgroups and mailing list archives didn't bring much light into it.

I asked in the Courier-IMAP mailing list and the only answer (from 
Courier-IMAP developer) only stated that he thought samba wouldn't be 
able to correctly handle ":" charaters in filenames (which Courier-IMAP 
uses).

I did a really quick check with stock samba 2.2.7 included in RedHat 7.3 
and I can create a file named "hi:bye" and I can read it thru an smb 
mount... buy if I list the directory containing it, it appears as 
"HIBYE~7C", so it's obviously doing some mangling in there.

First question is, can I disable all name mangling on a share that will 
be accessed only by unix machines? or is there any mounting options that 
allows me to do this?

Second (and most important) question is... will SMB provide better 
performance or more resilience in an all-linux environment? or should I 
stick with NFS?

TIA.

--
Mariano Absatz
El Baby
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Double your drive space - delete Windows!