Re: Samba or NFS
On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 1:33 PM, John A. Sullivan III
<jsullivan@opensourcedevel.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-06-03 at 23:08 -0400, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 11:08 AM, Dan <ganchya@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > I have two linux servers. One file server (debian) that is running
>> > samba and one application server (redhat). I would like to mount the
>> > shares of the file server in the application server. The problem is
>> > that the usernames are very different. Samba is already running and
>> > easier to set-up. NFS seems to be more difficult to set-up and also
>> > there are more security issues.
>> >
>> > Which are the advantages of NFS over Samba (cifs) other than the
>> > symbolic links. I read that even some people prefer samba over NFS to
>> > connect Unix to Unix.
>> >
>> > Thanks,
>> > Dan
>>
>> CIFS clients mishandle mixed case filenames, such as 'file.txt",
>> "FILE.txt", and "FILE.TXT". They also have a massively different idea
>> of how file ownership and privileges work than the POSIX standards
>> built into most UNIX and Linux native filesystems. And while I very
>> much applaud the work of the Samba team for providing this
>> cross-compatibility tool, it performs like a *dog* compared to NFS,
>> AFS, ZFS, or the other more powerful network based fileysstems.
>>
>> NFS needs some attention to security: so does CIFS. But most of the
>> complexities CIFS does more trivilally, such as mixed group ownership,
>> can be resolved with tools built into NFS such as "netgroups" suport.
>> And holy moley, but the speed of simple network operations like
>> Subversion checkouts is *grotesquely* faster under NFS.
>>
>>
> Interesting and helpful. I was always under the impression that NFS was
> oodles faster than CIFS after one adjusted rsize and wsize to something
> much larger than the defaults. However, one of our engineers recently
> tweaked SAMBA to use similarly large block sizes and it seems to have
> narrowed the gap. I did not take the time to actually measure so this
> is only anecdotal. Has anyone had any similar or contrary experiences?
> - John
These are general Linux issues, not Debian specific. That said, It's
very usage sensitive. Subversion checkouts on CIFS are ghods-awful
slow compared to doing it on NFS. The latest release of subversion
allegedly helps with the slow, but not *THAT* slow, performance on
local NTFS checkouts, and may help with this issue.
File ownership is a constant confusion between the two basic systems.
*DO NOT* try to manage the same file server and accessing its material
with the two different protocols. I've been this route, the claims of
"just set this" are generally complete handwaving, and cleaning up
when they break down can be a nightmare. I've been down this route
with Linux and UNIX and Windows file servers and NetApps, and I don't
recommend doing multiple access for *any* of them.
And don't get me *started* on the iSCSI pain, sorrow, and blood in the streets..
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