Samba vs NFS

[Satish Balay]

On Fri, 28 May 2004, Ow Mun Heng wrote:

> On Fri, 2004-05-28 at 07:04, Anthony J Placilla wrote:
>> On Mon, 2004-05-24 at 16:53, Craig White wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2004-05-21 at 18:12, Ow Mun Heng wrote:
>>>> Hi Guys,
>>>>
>>>> 	I have a problem. I want to access a shared directory over a WAN link.
>>>>
>>>> There are 2 methods available to me, NFS and Samba.
>>>>
>>>> Problem is the Client is a Linux Box, and somehow the idea of using
>>>> samba as a means to an end instead of NFS is a little bit weird (?).
>>>>
>>>> But anyway, I tried both and it seems that I have more success using
>>>> samba to mount the share rather than using NFS.
>>>>
>>>> NFS always reports a time-out connecting the server. Yes, there is a
>>>> 200ms lag in ping times to the server box (WAN link)
>>>>
>>>> However, Samba seems to be able to handle it more gracefully than NFS.
>>>>
>>>> Ideas?? Comments??
>>> ----
>>> samba/SMB uses UDP whereas NFS uses TCP - hence the issues of speed vs.
>>> reliability. You could probably google the idea of using UDP instead of
>>> TCP on NFS connections but myself, I would opt for reliability.

I thought its the other way arround. NFS is primarly udp based
(however newer versions have an option to configure it over tcp). And
I've tunneled SMB over ssh - and I'm pretty sure SMB is over tcp.

The advantage of SMB is the connection/auth is at the user level -
instead of root level. The big problem with SMB is - it doesn't
preserve unix permissions.

However FC2 has support for CIFS - and apparently if 'unix extensions'
are enabled on samba side - then the file permissions are
preserved. With my limited usage of cifs - things were not working
that well with FC2 (test releases).

Satish