At 19:28 29/06/00 +1000, you wrote:>a customer asked me about the difference between using Samba and NFS.AFAIK The answers are roughly the following: The difference between Samba and NFS is primarily that Samba uses the SMB (aka Lanmanager) protocol which is considered "standard" for PCs (Windows and OS/2 both have built in support for it, a free client is also available for DOS, I'm not sure about MacOS), whereas NFS uses its own protocol (usually just called "NFS") which is not commonly available for PCs (NFS clients do exist for operating systems other than UNIX/Linux, but they're usually neither free or easy to setup). Samba's SMB protocol allows the server machine to handle authentication, so it can decide what files the client has access to based on the particular machine and user connecting. NFS by default trusts all client machines completely (it's really not intended to share files to unsecured workstations) and lets the client machines handle authentication all on their own (once an NFS server has been told to accept connections from a client machine the client does not require any further server-side authentication, and can do anything it wants with the filesystem NFS gives it access to). SMB does not (directly) support UNIX style file permissions, so it is probably a bad idea to routinely use it to map filesystems between machines which expect this information to be present and mutable, NFS of course supports all standard UNIX file information (this also means that SMB is fine for accessing a UNIX filesystem from a Windows machine, but not so hot the other way around).> He has also > asked me if the filesystems exported with nfs can be also exported with >Samba, and if the files being used can be locked properly.Yes, Samba can share anything which is accessable as a filesystem on the host upon which it is running. File locking is a slightly more complex issue, two cases have to be considered: 1. Creating a Samba share which contains (or is under) an NFS mount point: This is fine. 2. Creating a Samba share which is equivalent to an NFS exported filesystem on the same host: This may not be fine. The problem is that Samba handles Windows-style file locking internally whereas NFS uses UNIX-style file locking at the kernel level. Problems can occurr if the same file is accessed by both SMB and NFS at the same time. You can however prevent these problems from happening through careful server configuration (allowing NFS and Samba to share the same filesystem without any problems). See http://us2.samba.org/samba/ftp/docs/textdocs/File-Cacheing.txt for details. I should of course mention that I am not an expert, I may have left something out. -- "I've always wanted to be somebody. Next time I'll be more specific."
I've got an odd configuration that seems to be encountering a serious
problem. Here's a basic diagram of the system:
NETWORK:
+----------------+ +----------------+
| BOX1 | | BOX2 |
| -2.2.13 | | -2.2.16 |
| -Mandrake6.1 | | -RedHat 7.0 |
| | | |
| |-------+------| |
| -SMB server | | | -NFS server |
| -NFS client | | | |
+----------------+ | +----------------+
|
+----------------+ |
| BOX3 | |
| -WinNT 4.0 | |
| -SP5 | |
| | |
| +-------+
| |
| -SMB client |
+----------------+
PROBLEM:
BOX2 has a directory that is exported through the NFS server. BOX1
mounts that directory and then shares it using SMB. BOX3 maps to that
SMB share and then tries to rename one of the directories. BOX2 and
BOX1 simultaneously lock up!
BOX3 can map the drive fine. Open, Save, Create, and Rename
documents. But any work with renaming or creating a new directory
fails.
BOX1 (in a terminal) can Open, Save, Create, and Rename files and
direcotries just fine on the mounted NFS directory without any
problems.
Neither BOX1 or BOX2 report any errors. The just hang when BOX3 tries
to create or rename a directory on the share that is the NFS mounted
directory.
SPECIFICS:
================================== /etc/exports from BOX2
================================/ BOX1(rw)
================================== Permissions on BOX2 ======= for
/usr/local/apache =================================drwxr-xr-x root root
================================== /etc/fstab from BOX1
==================================BOX2:/usr/local/apache /mnt/BOX2 nfs
rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft 0 0
================================== Permissions on BOX1 ========= for /mnt/BOX2
===================================drwxr-xr-x root root
================================== /etc/smb.conf from BOX1
===============================[global]
workgroup = WORKGROUP
netbios name = BOX1
server string = BOX1 File Server
encrypt passwords = Yes
update encrypted = Yes
log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m
max log size = 50
read raw = No
write raw = No
name resolve order = lmhosts host bcast
time server = Yes
wins support = Yes
hosts allow = 10.1.1.
create mask = 0644
[BOX2]
comment = Root Directory on BOX2
path = /mnt/BOX2
writeable = Yes
================================== User conecting from BOX3
==============================The user connecting from BOX3 is pboal.
The permissions on the /usr/local/apache/htdocs where
all of the writing is occurring are:
drwxr-xr-x pboal pboal
Thanks for the help!
--Paul
P.S.
NFS Server is from nfs-utils-0.1.9.1-7
NFS Client is from knfsd-1.4.1-2mdk
SMB Server is version 2.0.7
I have a solaris 7 server for intel running both nfs - to talk to other unix boxes - and samba, for sharing files across my nt net. I cannot - although i have the acl parameter set to true, change permissions on the nt side. i used swat and all seems to be fine. is there an incompatibility when running samba and nfs? please help! Steve Sproston Information Technology Manager Brooks Automation Software ph: 604.214.5050 fax: 604.214.5001 -------------- next part -------------- HTML attachment scrubbed and removed