Hi All,

Having an issue with AIX and CIFS_FS using SMB 1.0 protocol. Upon further investigation with IBM it appears that NFS would be a better candidate for us to handle file locking.

Currently we're connecting AIX to a Windows File server using SMB. We'd like to change this to handle NFS.

I'm seeking feedback if possible from anyone that has used AIX NFS client to connect to a Windows 2008 NFS share. How did it work for you? What kind of volume / traffic do you have?

Would I be better off looking at a RedHat system instead of Windows Server 2008?

Any help / tips / advise greatly appreciated.

The last time I worked with AIX was when version 5.1 was still pretty new. At that time the most solid solution was the SAMBA CIFS mount option. NFS worked fine, but was not as dependable for long durations on our network. (Our results may not have been typical, but were quite dependable. We could count on about the same number of failures or faults per month.

Our situation was a well designed switched network, but the mount traffic we almost entirely restricted to server-to-server traffic with only a small number of servers involved.

The situation may have changed, my job did so I stopped tracking that situation. I know that there have been improvements in the NFS and locking code, drivers, and AIX that may pertain.

Windows does not come with an NFS server. I would expect to see it had they continued to update the NT UNIX SERVICE extensions, but ... If there is a free MicroSoft approved solution we wil hope that someone will chime in here with that news.

In order then to get a Windows share as an NFS mount you may require an FOSS or third party package to act as a server on that Windows machine.

RHEL comes with one of the two most solid NFS server packages I know of at no extra cost. IT also supports a very solid version of SAMBA, meaning that you can get mounts to RHEL shares BOTH ways (perhaps even at the same time, but I have not attempted that scenario ). This makes mounting RHEL instead of Windows a very interesting and appealing option. Where I now work we mount about 7 share areas on a single Linux server from between 40 and 120 workstations daily with no issues. We also use NFS mounts between Linux servers on less predictable occasion, with no issues. I have not metered throughput, but can vouch for the reliability of this solution: it has been very solid for us.

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Thanks for the information. . Still working it out and will probably build a test system. Unfortunately Samba and CIFS is out of the question. It seems Windows 2008 Server has a built in NFS server in which I was having a play with yesterday.