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

Andrew Bartlett abartlet at samba.org
Sun Nov 16 00:50:12 GMT 2003


On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 22:28, Nils Kalchhauser wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I have had a short look at that comparison document and have to say that
> it sounds very biased. 

Yes - FacetCorp is trying to sell a CIFS server :-)

> Additionally, it is not really applicable to the
> original problem, because it does not consider an all Unix environment as
> given. (it states for example that for CIFS you don't have to install
> anything on the client PCs)

For an all-unix environment, I would not suggest the use of CIFS.  There
are not a spectacular number of better alternatives, but it mostly comes
down to which compromises to choose.  CIFS was not written for POSIX
semantics, so it's use in a pure-POSIX environment is difficult.  It can
be made to work (we have the CIFS unix extensions for that reason) but
it doesn't come naturally.

With NFS, you have per-host security.  If you trust the hosts, but not
the network, then secure the network (IPsec, etc).

If you don't trust the hosts, then per-user authenticated tools like SFS
(www.fs.net) might be the right idea.  If you want the established
distributed filesystem, look at AFS.  The other options are things like
CODA, or the very promising NFSv4.  

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                 abartlet at pcug.org.au
Manager, Authentication Subsystems, Samba Team  abartlet at samba.org
Student Network Administrator, Hawker College   abartlet at hawkerc.net
http://samba.org     http://build.samba.org     http://hawkerc.net
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