Date: Thu, 01 Jun 2000 23:26:56 -0600 From: Chris Fedde <chris@fedde.littleton.co.us> To: support@tecpro.com Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: NFS -vs- Samba Message-ID: <200006020526.e525Quv57319@fedde.littleton.co.us> In-Reply-To: <3936FE36.27430.E262A5@localhost>
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On Fri, 2 Jun 2000 00:22:14 -0400 "Charles Peters - Tech Support" wrote:
+------------------
| Hello Yall!
|
| Can anyone point me to a good explination on the differences in
| NFS and Samba.
+------------------
I can't point to any succinct explanations other than to point you
to the documentation for both and make your own conclusions. Still
I have a few thoughts that I'd like to share.
NFS grew up in a peer to peer environment where client and server
had a different meaning than they did in the DOS world. In the
Unix world a client is a program that opens a connection, and the
server is the program that waits for connections. Thus a system
will be a server of some things and a client of others. For example
in one former environment that I managed each workstation exported
it's non-system disk into a pool that was universally available to
all other stations. This was done for home sharing and to provide
common access to applications, code revision control, and data
resources.
This is in contrast to the PC paradigm, where the server is the
central system and the client is the distributed system. This is
the way most Novell, LANMAN and NT administrators think about their
environments. For example at another place I worked there were
several Novell servers that hosted applications and file shares
for hundreds of PCs. Beyond some very simple functionality these
PCs were useless if the "network" was unavailable.
This difference in usage of the words "client" and "server" was at
the core of many misunderstandings about Unix networking.
Enter Samba... Samba was developed to fill a need where PC users
wanted access to files available on a Unix box but it was inconvenient
to run an NFS client on the PC. With Samba it became possible to
use the unix system as if it were a LANMAN file server. The big
problem here is that LANMAN (and WfW, NT and the rest) has a
different idea of permissions, locking, and access semantics than
Unix systems do. Samba has to provide a series of mappings and
alternative implementations to allow the two systems to cooperate.
Thus Samba would be a poor tool to choose if the environment
contained only Unix systems.
I like to think of NFS, AMD and Samba in a flexibility hierarchy.
I use NFS to export available space from various systems into a
"pool". I then use AMD to create a "virtual hierarchy" over that
pool. Finally I use Samba to provide wintel users with access to
the virtual hierarchy.
Finally Samba does provide a command line tool called smbclient that
allows a unix system to access shares and printers exported from
wintel systems. I've only use this for debugging and for some
simple scripted file distribution tasks.
chris
--
Chris Fedde
303 773 9134
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