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Re: Replacing NFS with Samba



Clive Menzies wrote:

On (29/01/05 16:24), Daniel L. Miller wrote:
Tom Allison wrote:

Daniel L. Miller wrote:

Can I replace NFS sharing with a Samba server - and still provide the same user rights?

--
Daniel


Why would you do that unless it was only for the purpose of supporting Windows?

There are authentication models for Samba.
I've been having some major problems with a couple workstations on my network. They are setup to mount the home directory tree from an NFS server. The problem is, for some reason, the network connection gets interrupted periodically for a moment. I'm still investigating the physical connections - but every time it happens, the X-Windows session locks up. I was hoping Samba would provide a more fault-tolerant environment.
Hi Daniel

I've also been looking to replace NFS with Samba (I administer mixed
networks and trying to simplify things).  On the Linux clients I tried
smb4k which seemed to work fine for a while and then became quite
erratic.  I also encountered problems when trying to write to Samba
shares - it would fail to overwrite an existing file but end up leaving
a file of 0 bytes.  So until recently, I reverted to NFS.

However, following something I spotted on the list I tried cifs instead
of smbfs and it seems to have solved the writing to shares problem.

If someone can, I'd appreciate a little explanation about the differences between mounting shares as CIFS vs. SMBFS - they seem to be the same, and I don't change anything on my Samba3 server.

 I
tried smb4k again and it was fine for a while and then seemed become
unstable.  I am waiting to the alioth 64bit mirror to come back on stream
so I can try xsmbbrowser instead.

Other than browsing shares with smb4k, samba is performing really well.
I run openoffice in a 32bit chroot environment and that is
reading/writing shares with no problem.

In short, using cifs on the clients has resulted in being being able to
consider dumping nfs.

Regards

Clive

What I'm trying to mount is both a common data area, and user home directories. The common data area mounts via smbfs/cifs with no problem. Ideally, I'd like the share to be mounted with the permissions of the currently logged-in user. I don't know how to do that, so I do it using the user/pass of the primary user for that workstation. The users are not superusers, and log in via KDM. My current fstab line is:

//server/data /data cifs defaults,suid,exec,user=abc,pass=123,uid=abc,gid=domusers 0 0

A similar line for /home did not work for cifs - at least for X-Windows. So I'm still using NFS:

server:/home /home nfs defaults,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=10,tcp 0 0

But I still have these intermittent disconnect/re-connects, and when that happens X-Windows locks up. This is only happening on one workstation - and the complete workstation has been replaced, along with a fresh Debian install - so I believe the only thing left is the physical connection starting from the workstation patch cord and ending with the 10BaseT switch.


Any assistance here would be sincerely appreciated.

Daniel



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