On Mon, Jan 18, 2016 at 10:33 PM, <waben...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Sharing files can be done via SCP/SFTP. If a VPN connection is used, > then even NFS or FTP are possibilities.
I have 100 computers. I want a user on those 100 computers to be able to share a file on their computer with just me. On windows they just right-click and pick sharing, search for my name on the domain, and grant me permissions. You're not going to get an experience anything like that with scp or nfs or ftp. Heck, nfs is almost completely insecure in the way most people use it. I don't just want to copy a file from point A to point B. I want to have a robust set of permissions and security and so on behind that. If a user changes their password, that password gets them access to everything they used to have access to, and none of those random clients ever see the password. Sure, you can do it on linux with lots of NFSv4 and kerberos and all that. But it is painful to set up and almost nobody actually seems to do it as a result. You can also do something like Bitlocker on linux, but there isn't a single distro that supports it out of the box because it uses a lot of features nobody has bothered to seriously develop. (Before somebody points out LUKS, be aware that Bitlocker lets you do full-disk encyption that is secure without having to actually type a decryption key at any point. Remove the hard drive or boot from a CD, and the disks are unreadable - you can only read them if you boot off them on the original PC.) It is just a bit frustrating to behold. But, I'm getting what I'm paying for, so... :) -- Rich
