samba vs nfs
 

I recently setup samba then nis/nfs on my home network mostly to see what they were about. After dealing with them a bit I was wondering what were the advantages of samba over nfs or the other way around.

I did do my homework on this a bit and it seems from quite a few mailing lists and forums that the only advantage mentioned is samba can interact with windows. Also on these forums they had this topic but everytime the person posted they had one or two windows clients so the choice ended up being samba.

They also had some from a security perspective but just from my own thinking and some of the replies the level of security is really in the hands of the person writing the config files, so this should not really be a factor in picking one over the other.

So besides the obvious windows abilities of samba over nfs is there any real advantage?

samba = unix to windows
nfs = unix to unix

that's as clear as it gets really, and speaks for itself i'd have thought. samba is a LOT more than file sharing though, it's all that domain membership crap, printer sharing and all sorts. it's much more complicated than nfs as you are talking to machines that behave very differently to standard unix variants.

Hi tgo,

MS has added nfs support to their xp / 2003 series I think.
So there is no need to rely on samba only to get connected with windows.

Advantage of nfs:- Full support as it is native
Disadvatage of nfs:- I don't know really but it is said to be insecure as it does not encrypt data on connection

SAMBA:-- Its just great

PS also try mars nwe server

tgo,
KDE provides fish://, which is brilliant if your computers are all linux (mine are).
Just put fish://name_of_computer into konqueror and you'll see a listing of your remote home directory, where you can drag & drop files.
Fish uses ssh to establish the connection, so you'll need to have sshd installed and running. If you have ssh set up for key-based authentication, you won't need to enter any passwords.

HTH

There are implementations for DOS so a dos-machine can connect to nfs. I guess (although I could not find it easily) that it will be possible for Windows machines as well.

NFS access is already there in xp & 2003 server I guess

well yes, and there are commercial win32 nfs servers we use where i work and i also assume that the M$ unix tools suite provide some level of nfs connectivity, but what things are desgined for and how they are actually used are different things.

you guess?? :confused: no it's not there by default at all.

Hi acid,

I guessed because I have not used MS products for many months I had heard it somewhere in a thread

Bye...
Thanks for the update