[Samba] About NAS versus Samba

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 9:44 PM, Fernando Lozano <fernando at lozano.eti.br> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> Has anyone tried to configure a NAS server to authenticate users using a
> Samba PDC, or even a Samba4 DC (AD-compatible) or an IPA server?

Given choices, I used NFS. Samba is great for cross compatibility, but
CIFS is a very chatty protocol with some longstanding complexities
leading to awkward access control in my experience.

That said, I've built a render cluster with 200 nodes running a 40
TByte storage setup with Samba 3.x for the Windows clients and NFSv3
for the SuSE users. It worked much better than the commercially funded
storage array. (Ran headlong into the 2 TByte storage size issue due
to 32-bit fiber optic controllers, but split it into 4 10 TByte
arays.)

I also did the first published ports of Samba to SunOS 4.1.x, so I've
done a *lot* of setups.
> I'm evaluating replacing some Linux file server for a NAS product, but
> all them make me nervous when the vendor talks about "Active Directory
> support" and nothing else.
>
> In theory, many NASes are Linux boxes running samba, so there shouldn't
> be a problem, except if the web admin interface won't support a samba DC
> setup and I won't have SSH access to configure the NAS samba myself.
>
> So I'm asking if someone there has had any real experience, be it using
> Fedora, CentOS or RHEL as the Samba3 PDC or Samba4 DC.

More building them up from scartch as part of other services. For
commercial NAS support, I've been dealing a lot with NetApp, which
incorporates a lot of the mirroring and snapshots and high performance
issues an off the shefl USB disk storage box won't have. Those do play
nicely with Samba, AD, and usually NIS as well.

> PS: I'm cross-posting because I asked before on the samba mailing list
> and nobody cared to answer. Or nobody has had any real experience. I'm
> hoing many sysadmins on the Fedora list also works on companies with
> RHEL or CentOS and had a real experience to share.
>
>
> []s, Fernando Lozano
>
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