RE: Samba vs NFS
"Bryce Porter" <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.comp.security.linux |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
It seems everyone is failing to mention NFSv4. IIRC, it requires Kerberos and is supposed to be even faster and more reliable than NFSv3. It may be worth looking into, albeit still marked experimental in the Linux kernel, and probably not well supported (read: if at all) by any third-party Windows NFS drivers / applications. Personally, I prefer to use samba and tunnel (ipsec, stunnel, etc) between networks, generally due to the timeout issues / etc, and the cross platform support (it is cheaper, financially as well as in labor, to support netbios than it is NFS across different platforms). Generally, I would consider any implementation, whether it be samba, NFS, AFS, Coda, etc to be "insecure" if it were open directly to the outside world at all. If you are infact going from network to network across an open medium (read: the Internet, MAN, etc), it would be a wise from a security standpoint to tunnel it through some kind of crypto. Good luck with your research and implementation. Regards, Bryce Porter . Network Administrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Heart Technologies, Inc. 3105 N. Main St. E. Peoria, il 61611 p. 309.427.7020 f. 309.427.7382 e. [email protected] w. www.heart.net -----Original Message----- From: net shark [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2005 11:43 AM To: [email protected] Subject: RE: Samba vs NFS IMHO both have a dark history when it comes to security. In the old days NFS was a nightmare; in recent years samba has shown more holes, especially serious remote buffer overflows, which lead to root compromise. From the performance point of view, NFS used to be a joke, as it flooded the network with keepalives, and although samba used broadcasts, it managed to be better than NFS. NFS version 3 is quite another story. It can successfully compete with samba when it comes to performance issues. There are tests that show that NFSv3 is generally better than samba. Samba uses a layer of non routable protocols (Netbios). It doesn't work between networks, without a NAT helper or some sort of tricks that emulate a samba proxy. On the other hand NFS is quite happy with working between networks. There are other options on this field like coda, AFS, etc... Hope it helps, Alex