I am trying to setup a Linux file server that windoze clients can access. I have done some reading up on Samba and NFS. From what I gathered, Samba is used to run a Windoze file server that Linux clients to access and NFS is not secure. Is this correct? Or am I way off base here?

Any help would be great.

NFS is a damn sight better than samba... security is not an issue. but it's not for windows clients without some farting around with.

you want http://samba.org

Thanks for the reply. However, here is my problem. I have a client that is using a Windoze 2000 server as a file server. It is crapping out on him. I am selling him on the stability of Linux for his file server, but it will be very hard to selling him on changing all of his work stations to Linux. I just want to migrate the server.

Hope this clears things up a bit.

Been using Samba for over three years here. Other than applying the updates to it it's very low maintenance. Even easier to manage if you have a W2k box.

I run a 200 person network off of 2 samba servers. One of them acts like a domain controller, the other just serves up our RAID.

It works a damnsight better that Win2k. If you need some pointers, tips, or recipies email me at yoda@etoyoc.com

NFS is used to share files between Unix-like machines. I have seen libraries for windows that will let them talk across NFS. NFS <i>can</i> be insecure. It assumes that user_id 1003 on the client is the same person as user_id 1003 on the server. This is particularly a problem for user_id 0 (root), unless you use the root_squash option. The other issue with NFS is that is only really authenticates by IP.

Back in college I could take my linux laptop over to the lap and mount the solaris server's NFS shares as root. I don't think my discovery mad ANYONE comfortable. It was fixed immediately.

I'm not sure if I'm barking up the right tree here. I am fairly new to the *unix community. So once again I hear about the security issues regarding NFS. So as of now I think that I will stay clear of that.

So I guess Samba is the way to go ( unless there is another program out there for *unix servers to run the file server function that I am looking for )

What I'm looking for is replacing their w2k server with a Redhat Linux box. I am hoping to make this transition tranparent to all of the employees that are accessing the files from their work stations. I'm not sure if this is possible. please let me know if this is possible, or if I'm wasting my time.

Thanks

No worries, if you copy their files to the right places
they'll never notice the difference :) ... well, it will be
faster, and won't die on them ;)

Cheers,
Tink

Are you going to be accessing the files from the windows pcs as guest or strictly by authenticated users? Set-up is fairly simple if you use guest account access. It will be (slightly) more time consuming for authenticated users because you will have to add all the usernames and passwords to the linux server. (unless you authenticate off a PDC, but that is a different story entirely).

But the benefits are great! Samba even seems faster on machines that have half the power of a WIN2k machine. It also makes a great print server. It seems to run forever as well. Make sure you put a good power supply and ups in place because you may never have to turn this machine off again! This is a lot better than the normal weekly reboots of WIN2K that people sometimes have to deal with. Linux really is that stable.

I don't plan on using the guest account. I don't have a problem setting up the unix accounts for each of the users.

the main issue is the fact that I want to keep all of the pc's to remain windows.

This is the answer that I was looking for. Could you please put me in the right direction to set this up? I have read the man pages for Samba, but was confused when it was telling me that this service was for unix clients to connect to windows/unix servers.

regards

I'm confused

you might have been reading the smbclient man page.

Samba can be used by unix clients to access windows servers. The use you are wanting is for the Samba server program. Both the client and server programs are included in the samba distribution. Simply install the latest samba distribution and then edit your smb.conf file (usually located in /etc/smb.conf) and you are on your way. Just set up a directory on your HD to share.

There are good documentation links on the http://www.samba.org website. These are where I learned the setup of samba. Don't get discouraged when first setting this up. There seems to be a lot of options to the configuration file but only a few are needed for a simple file server.

Good Luck!

you need to concern yourself with 'smb.conf'. it controls what, where, how and to whom the smb services will be offered.

Read up on that first.

Thanks alot everyone. This really helped me out on this. I finally got the server to do what I want. Username and password.

For the ones that are new to Samba, don't forget to add both the Unix user and the Samba user before they can connect.



Regards