Re: [K12OSN] NFS and Samba questions

[Steve Langasek <vorlon dodds net>]

On Tue, Mar 26, 2002 at 07:26:29PM -0500, Julius Szelagiewicz wrote:
> Quentin,
> 	DFS is rather lame, NFS is a nightmare in multiserver environment,
> especialy with WAN links involved and Samba is nothing to write home
> about. All 3 don't really work well in encrypted mode. If you really need
> a distributed file system look at AFS. Andrew File System from
> Crnegie-Mellon U. was designed to be a secure distributed fs. the setup of
> kerberized version can be a bitch, but I've met people that swear by it
> and the results were spectacular. I am planning a setup for late fall.
> good luck, julius

The learning curve and hardware requirements for AFS are far beyond those 
for Samba, not to mention the administrative headache involved in trying 
to run AFS client software on all the Windows machines.  DFS may not be 
perfect, but it sounds like Quentin's already familiar with it, which 
makes it a lot easier to get working for him than a from-scratch AFS 
setup.

For Linux client machines, I don't know that Samba's MSDFS support will be 
of much use, so maybe AFS is an option there -- although I think in those 
circumstances I'd look into NFS and an automounter as an option, first.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer