I posted on a different website asking about how to "share" files across servers. Basically what I want to do is have one server be the upload server for the public and then, once uploaded, the uploaded file will be sent to the storage server.

My first idea was to have a scp command which would send the file over, but then someone posted that by setting up a NFS (Network File System) across the two servers, the file can be placed in the remote server in a much more efficient fashion (since this process will occur very often).

Alright, so is there anything I should watch out for? Does a network filesystem pose any danger? And does it drain the performance of the host server?

Basically what I want to do is have the remote (storage) server be the host (meaning that a specific section or so will be the shared to the upload server). Then once the file is uploaded, my php script will simply copy the uploaded file into the /mounted section (which is the network directory). Is this how it works?

I find this method of having the network setup very useful since: I do not have to setup apache or litehttp on the storage server, I do not have to setup PHP and any extensions (GD), and I do not have to worry about users being sent to the storage server's upload page. Also I can have all the image processing and resizing occur on the upload server and then once the final image is complete, it will be placed in the storage server.

Am I on the right track?

Having the NFS mount in place doesn't really impact network bandwidth . The only time you're really impacting the network is when you're doing writes or reads to the filesystem on the remote host but you would have that same impact if you were doing an scp from one host to another.

The reason they suggested NFS was that you would end up with a performance penalty if you were doing this kind of scp frequently due to stopping/starting connections on both hosts. If it is really frequent then NFS makes perfect sense because you're copy on the remote host is treated as "local" from one filesystem to a another and uses the already established connection rather than having to open one each time.

It is very common to have NFS in UNIX/Linux environments just as it is to have file server shares to windows workstations. And of course you could use those same windows shares on UNIX/Linux with samba.