[CentOS] Using CentOS 5 as server; best way to setup NFSv4?

Sat Aug 2 04:44:14 UTC 2008
MJT <centos at mjt1.com>

On Friday 01 August 2008 5:27:50 pm Ryan Dunn wrote:

If you are running your lan as a lab to learn, I would suggest one thing. From 
what I have read, it seems you just want to have everything work together in 
a simple manor. 

Since you have windows involved, you might consider having everything run with 
samba. With samba, every system would be able to share and use shares on 
every other computer.  

You could set up a samba server as a domain controller and use something like 
pam_smb, pam_ntdom or libpam-smbpass (i've used libpam-smbpass on other 
systems, but do know if centos makes it available anywhere, it is the only 
one that I know of that allows for update of the password from Linux) to 
allow the Linux boxes to authenticate against the samba server.

http://www.freebooks.by.ru/view/SambaIn24h/ch16-03.htm

In this case, you would not need to set up LDAP which I think is a bit much 
for what it sounds like you are trying to do. Because you would be mounting 
Linux to Linux using Samba, you would not need to worry about NFS at all. 

If it were just a Linux home network, I would do NFS3 with (probably a bad 
word here) NIS. Yes, NIS is insecure, but so is NFS3. If you use a firewall 
that would block outgoing NIS packets, it should do good enough for a home 
network. 

How this simplifies everything:

1: Only one network file system for both windows and Linux, not NFS for Linux, 
samba for windows. 

2: Allows Linux access to windows shares and printers. 

3: If you are using libpam-smbpass you do not need to use a something like 
LDAP, but rather passdb backend = tdbsam . 

Your needs may be more complex than what I assumed, but I wanted to put 
forward one way to consider...