Doubting between NFS and SSHFS

xri · 02-14-2009, 12:10 PM

I am planning to set up a small business LAN with 3 to 10 Linux computers sharing files. There will be some common folders/files used simultaneously by all users. Additional collaboration will involve groupware and internal communication (email,I IM, etc).

My choices at this point have boiled down to NFS and SSHFS. My priorities while using this LAN will be:

Stability of the information (resistance to corruption).
Speed, flexibility and ease to maintain.
Security (all the information is confidential).

I've done some initial reading on LQ and other sources about this topic. I will appreciate your opinions/experiences.

acid_kewpie · 02-15-2009, 04:56 AM

Unless you have a specific need to encrypt the data, I would recommend sticking with good old NFS. It's simple and it works, and can still be pretty secure in terms of access rights. SSHFS is a nice idea, but is essentially a hack (albeit a good one) of ssh and fuse. Follow NFS security recommendations and you'll be fine. If you do need encryption, you have a middle ground of NFS *over* SSH too.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NFS-HOWTO/security.html