Re: Samba vs NFS

On Thursday, February 17 at 05:42 PM, quoth Jennifer Fountain:
> Hi all:
> My company is looking at samba or NFS to allow our clients to access
> shares from their Windows workstations and their linux ssh sessions.
> From a security standpoint, which option is "more" secure?  Which option
> is more vulnerable than the other?  Etc, etc ,etc.  I appeciate any
> security information about NFS or samba that you may have.

Something you should know... NFS doesn't use passwords. NFS decided to 
skip the whole security thing. The way it works is that in the NFS 
server you specify what computers are allowed to use the server, and 
those servers have full access. Whoever the clients say they are, the 
server will trust them, including root. The idea is that it is the 
client operating system's responsibility to make sure that people are 
who they say they are. NFS trusts clients completely. Typical NFS 
installations have either very few clients, or the clients are all 
closely controlled by the administrator.

If you're going to be allowing, say, Windows machines to access your 
file server, I STRONGLY suggest using a file sharing protocol that does 
NOT trust the clients. If Samba is your only alternative, go for Samba. 
There's also stuff like OpenAFS that you can consider.

~Kyle
-- 
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.
-- H. G. Wells

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Comment: Thank you for using encryption!

iD8DBQFCGrIPBkIOoMqOI14RAj7eAKDR0TYAxT8Fxc7eeaVaD/NHEYBVLQCfdB1j
BTwzcQttONzF6ep+adPcZq4=
=GIUk
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----