[CentOS] SAMBA vs NFS

[Craig White]

On Thu, 2009-11-26 at 10:15 -0500, Alan McKay wrote:
> Hey folks,
> 
> A coworker wants to share drives between CentOS systems via SAMBA,
> which sort of seems pretty counter intuitive to me.   But he says he's
> had troubles in the past with NFS.   He was sort of short on details,
> but something about NFS not being reliable unless you enable NFS
> locking, but when you do that, you can end up in situations where if
> the server crashes it can cause the clients to hang too.
> 
> I've used NFS for years in other jobs and don't recall issues like this.
> 
> Thoughts?
----
having a server crash will cause all sorts of problems for the clients
whether they are using NFS or Samba

I always set up server so that users can mount and use shares in their
native format and actually use LDAP for absolute consistency in UID and
passwords...

NFS mounts for Linux users
Samba for Windows users
Netatalk for Macintosh clients

their user id is always the same and their password is always the same.

NFS mounts via LDAP automount
Samba mounts are typically handled by 'netlogon' script
Netatalk mounts via LDAP automount

the shares, ownership, etc are always the same so even if a user moves
from Linux to Windows, he still sees the same files with the same
permissions.

You can use 'soft' NFS mounts to not hang the clients but in reality, an
NFS server should never crash and rarely be restarted.

Craig


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