Question

SMB vs. NFS - which one is better for a mixed small office network?

Asked by: rpc800

We have a small office network (2 Macs, 3 PCs and a Thecus N5200 Pro NAS). I have constant problems with Samba - I am an advanced user, not an IT guru, and premissions, copy/move/delete and access problems in the mixed Mac/PC environment are a constant headache.

It isn't that we have a messed up setup (we have everything set up by the book...), but it is problems with using SMB in a mixed environment that I can see by searching around on the net others are running into as well (people who are much better at this stuff than I am are having similar problems with SMB with Macs and PCs).

I know little about NFS and I wonder if using NFS instead of CIFS/SMB would solve these problems? Or, for that matter, anything else our NAS can do (it also does AFP).

Would any of them solve the constant problems we are having with SMB?

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Asked On
2008-03-15 at 10:06:17ID23244165
Tags

N/A

,

SMB vs. NFS

,

Which one is better for a mixed small office network?

Topics

File Servers

,

Storage Technology

,

Networking Protocols

Participating Experts
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Points
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Comments
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Answers

 

by: eagle0468Posted on 2008-03-16 at 01:05:58ID: 21136105

What is your network OS?  Are you running in an Active Directory Domain, Appletalk, etc.?  This can determine if using NFS is more efficient.  I would say it would be considering SMB is a Microsoft protocol and AFP is Apple.  NFS should provide you a way to share resources that both clients should be able to connect to.  You can use the 'net use' command to connect to your NFS shares from your Windows clients.  In regard to your Apple machines I am not familiar with the connection method you would use, but I would assume it would be similar.  

Best of luck.

 

by: eagle0468Posted on 2008-03-16 at 01:08:06ID: 21136109

Connecting to an NFS server from OS X
With the Finder active, from the Go menu, select Connect to Server... . Alternatively, with the Finder active, press Cmd-k .


In the Connect to Server window that opens, next to the "Address:" field, type  nfs:// , followed by the fully qualified domain name (FQDN) or IP address of the server, a forward slash, and then the path of the exported share, for example,
  nfs://foo.com/home/u/jdoe
The nfs must be lowercase. You must also type the name of the export; the Finder will not ask you for it.

Click Connect.

 

by: rpc800Posted on 2008-03-16 at 03:09:04ID: 21136362

Hi,

The NAS I am using (Thecus N5200 Pro) is Linux-based, so that would be my network OS I guess? Currently I am running only CIFS/SMB on it, but it is capable of running AFP and NFS as well.

Thank you for describing how to connect to nfs, this is useful as I have never used NFS before, but my question was more along the lines of NFS being a good choice for our network (mixed PC and Mac) or not, and would it solve the constant file permission troubles I am running into using Samba?

Or, does it make sense to run multiple services (SMB+AFP+NFS) and use the best one for each computer to access the NAS (e.g. connect via AFP from Macs and via NFS from PCs)?

I guess I am a bit confused by the name "NFS" since its name implies it is a file system, but so are FAT32 and NTFS, etc. and when it comes to disks, you can't mix file systems. So is NFS only a protocol to access the files on a network, regardless of what file system is used on the remote server's disks to store the files?

Thanks,

Robert

 

by: Lonewolf70Posted on 2008-03-17 at 07:22:38ID: 21142359

NFS is, as you said, just a protocol to access files on a network.  It is not a file system type.  It is used primarily by UNIX systems to mount file systems on a network.  For example, you would use NFS on your NAS to attach UNIX clients while you use CIFS for your Windows clients.  You can setup multi-protocol file systems so that more than one type of server could access the same file system without causing problems with permissions (such as NFS and CIFS), but I don't think that this is the solution that you are looking for.

However, I don't have experience with Macs, so I don't really know if there is a better option than what you are using for those two.  It sounds like it may be worth testing one multi-protocol file system shared as both CIFS for the Windows clients and AFP for the Apple clients.

 

by: Lonewolf70Posted on 2008-03-17 at 07:23:50ID: 21142365

PS - When I said, "I don't think that this is the solution that you are looking for," I meant NFS + CIFS.   AFP + CIFS may be exactly what you need.

 

by: rpc800Posted on 2008-03-19 at 15:27:27ID: 31440034

Thank you for your assistance!

Robert

20120131-EE-VQP-002

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