On August 17, 2003 10:44 pm, David H. Askew wrote: > It will mainly be for other linux clients, but I would like to be able > to plug my win2000 work laptop into the network and have the files > available also. Is samba my only choice for supporting the windows > clients, or is there another option ? Is it possible to use Samba in > conjunction with other services and would I want too ? (i.e. would > something work better for the linux clients that would justify using two > different services to provide the same functionality ?)
This is, of course, my own personal opinion, but I've always preferred using NFS for my internal networks. Realistically, there is not a lot of difference between Samba and NFS to someone who's not overly technical, as the methodology is the same. Choose something to export, edit some configuration files, and make sure the file permissions are correct. Samba and NFS will both work over an encrypted tunnel. Samba and NFS both support user/group ownership and the like. NFS is more of a UNIXism, and hence has slightly better support for setting up file permissions correctly between multiple machines. You can configure on the server exactly how much access a client machine has to the exported file systems by mapping certain UIDs and GIDs to other users/groups on the server. Essentially, that would be the main difference. Samba, on the other hand, allows you to interface with Windows boxen. The downside to Samba is that SMB filesystem support isn't default. You have to maintain two separate password files to keep Samba working correctly (even though there is usually a 1 to 1 correlation between Samba users and Unix users.) In the end, Samba's overhead makes it a poor choice for sharing files between Unix systems exclusively. If it's there and you don't want to have to keep track of two sets of exports, then by all means compile in SMB support and use smbmount instead. Once it's part of your filesystem, you really don't notice the difference. My 2 cents, Brian -- Why do they call a fast a fast, when it goes so slow? [Public key available at http://www.cubik.ca/~brian/]
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