This all reminds me that I need to solve a much simpler problem at my work: I need to provide NFS access to some Windows clients. Right now, the files are accessed by having Totalnet installed on the Unix box, but no one wants to administer that anymore. If there was something the users could install on their desktops (like maybe 10 of them) we could get Totalnet out of the mix.
I know, the "right" solution is NetApp, and we've tried to convince this small user group of that. We have a NetApp (or 8 actually) this user group thinks the Unix performance to the NetApp isn't good enough. They want local (or SAN) storage on the Unix box with very high performance, and then PC access later, with much lower performance concern. Tom mentions NFS clients for Windows. What should I look at? - Tony Rudié -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tom Metro Sent: Sunday, April 19, 2009 1:50 AM To: L-bblisa Subject: Re: [BBLISA] sshfs Alex Aminoff wrote: > My thought would be sshfs. > http://fuse.sourceforge.net/sshfs.html That was my thought as well. I'm just waiting for a workable sshfs driver to become available for Windows and then I'll gladly get rid of Samba. (I run into way too many authentication headaches with Samba, which are always a pain to debug, and I've come to the conclusion that it's never going to get better, due to the crufty nature of the protocol (only made worse by NMB for name resolution) and the piles of code there to provide backwards compatibility.) Last time I looked I couldn't find an ssshfs for Windows, but I just ran across: Dokan : user-mode file system library for Windows http://dokan-dev.net/en/about/ for which there is apparently an sshfs driver: http://soi.kd6.us/2009/03/20/so-i-found-a-windows-sshfs/ I haven't benchmarked sshfs (been using it fro Linux), but I'm assuming the performance of sshfs is going to be lousy compared to NFS. Ideally I'd like to see a hybrid option for cases where you want strong authentication and access controls, but don't need to keep the data private over the wire. It could build on the existing ssh and public key infrastructure for authentication, and then use stateless UDP packets, probably with an attached HMAC for authenticity, for the data transport. Perhaps NFSv4 is close enough to this. (Is it any more of a pain to set up Kerberos than ssh and PKI? Perhaps.) The big drawback to any of these options is that they all require new clients, which aren't readily available on all platforms. It's hard enough finding a decent NFS client on Windows, never mind one that also supports v4. (Though of course there is existing wide support for ssh file access via FTP-like clients and scp, so technically the clients exist, but with a different UI.) -Tom -- Tom Metro Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA "Enterprise solutions through open source." Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/ _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa _______________________________________________ bblisa mailing list [email protected] http://www.bblisa.org/mailman/listinfo/bblisa
