Re: Samba vs NFS

On Mon, 2005-02-21 at 17:07 -0800, Avery Payne wrote:

> NFS is becoming "long in the tooth" and there are replacements that are 
> being proposed, but none have gained as much widespread traction as 
> NFS.  Look up AFS (and its cousin, OpenAFS), SFS, and the terms "network 
> filesystem" or "distributed filesystem" in Google.  AFS has also been 
> around but uses Kerberos authentication, SFS takes NFS further with 
> encryption and vastly-stronger user validation.

So,

What is suggested in a Linux to Linux environment to replace NFS?

AFAIK, NFS is only good if you (the admin) have total control over the
clients (root access and user accounts always map to the same uid like
LDAP, NIS).

OTOH, if other people (you don't trust) have root access or uids are not
map the sameway everywhere, NFS security is gone.

So, what other FS address this problems in Linux? Good authentication,
criptography if desired but not mandatory (some times it can slow down
the system), and most important stability.

A few years ago I search for a replacement of NSF (v3) and found nothing
good enough on Linux.  Most solutions were on slow development and had
bad stability. 

NFS v4 seems to address this problems but it is not close to be ready
(AFAIK).  RedHat seems to have some closed source fs solution (GFS i
think).

I even thought already about using a SAMBA to SAMBA Linux solution to
address parts of this problems.



So, what is there for real today?


Raul Dias