From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Jun 9 23:38:20 2008 Return-Path: Delivered-To: current@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 76D6F106564A for ; Mon, 9 Jun 2008 23:38:20 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from fbsd-current@mawer.org) Received: from outbound.icp-qv1-irony-out2.iinet.net.au (outbound.icp-qv1-irony-out2.iinet.net.au [203.59.1.107]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id EA1EA8FC14 for ; Mon, 9 Jun 2008 23:38:19 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from fbsd-current@mawer.org) X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AnkBALBUTUjLzq3r/2dsb2JhbAAIsDI X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.27,614,1204470000"; d="scan'208";a="327520022" Received: from unknown (HELO [10.24.1.1]) ([203.206.173.235]) by outbound.icp-qv1-irony-out2.iinet.net.au with ESMTP; 10 Jun 2008 07:08:52 +0800 Message-ID: <484DB796.4030204@mawer.org> Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:07:02 +1000 From: Antony Mawer User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 (Windows/20080421) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Peter Wemm References: <7d6fde3d0806091102k62637099qbaa73ca4d38ff64c@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Garrett Cooper , current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Moving from smbfs to cifs X-BeenThere: freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussions about the use of FreeBSD-current List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:38:20 -0000 Peter Wemm wrote: > On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Garrett Cooper wrote: >> I was wondering if there's been any serious thought put into >> migrating from smbfs (unmaintained project in kernel / userland since >> 2001) to cifs (currently supported Samba project). This is the >> mount_smbfs user tool that's available in userland. > > I was surprised to discover that smbfs works as well as it does. I > really was expecting a whole pile of panics, lockups etc, but for my > usage level, it seems to just work. The reason SMBFS probably works as well as it does is that servers (Windows, Samba, etc) are largely backwards compatible, so the older smbfs implementation on FreeBSD is able to talk to the appropriate servers using older protocols. The main areas where SMBFS currently fails compared with whats available on Linux etc: - No support for DFS, which is a reasonably serious impediment in any enterprise environment using Windows servers - Performance is less than fantastic - Problems dealing with various character encodings in filenames - Doesn't use DNS to resolve hosts (that i know of?), only NetBIOS The performance can be lived with in most cases, but the other points do pose varying impediments to more widespread use... --Antony