On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 01:01:45AM +1100, Sunnz wrote:
> Basically I want to set up a network share on my OpenBSD box which my
> Mac laptops and Linux laptops can access to.
>
> Smb (...) was a breeze to set up.
>
> I also tried out NFS in the past on OpenBSD. Got it to work but I
> don't really understand how it works. There aren't any form of
> authentication, just a list of IP that has access to it... which
> always seemed weird to me... that it uses whatever permission on the
> OpenBSD on the laptop, which doesn't really work out... like the group
> "users" can have a very different gid on Linux than on Mac. Maybe I am
> not using it correctly or understood how it is supposed to work?
>
> So now I am looking at AFP via Netatalk
SAMBA is indeed pretty good, so you could look into that.
I know you're not asking this (yet), but keep in mind that it's possible
to get OpenBSD to talk SMB, but it takes a little more work than just
invoking mount(8) with the proper options.
On the other hand, all those systems, and in fact any decent Unix, have
a very well-tested NFS client. And even Windows can be made to use NFS
with something like 'Services for UNIX'.
In short, connecting any random Unix system to NFS is a snap.
Basically, the same argument applies to AFP, but stronger - OpenBSD will
have some trouble, and clients are less well-tested than NFS clients.
In the end, though, both SMB and NFS are pretty good choices. But NFS is
more Unix-y.
If you need authentication, consider something simple like authpf(8).
(Which would have to "turn off" a "default deny"-type rule.)
If, on the other hand, you can do without even the little authentication
that NFS gives you, you can force all clients to use the same uid
(-mapall in exports(5)). This frees you from the hassle of keeping uids
and gids synchronized - and the cost may or may not be interesting.
Finally, consider net/unison. It's not a filesystem - more like a
two-way rsync - but can be tremendously useful if you want to keep some
files on multiple systems synchronized.
Joachim
--
TFMotD: env (1) - set and print environment
