CIFS or SAMBA

[Tamer Shaalan]

Hello all guys,

One question please ...

What is the best (recommended), to use CIFS or to use samba with HP-UX 11.11 ????
which is more powerful & flexible in configuration?????

Thanx a lot ..

Tamer.

[Dave Olker]

I always recommend customers to use HP's version of CIFS on HP-UX, but not so much because of any major feature differences, but because of support differences.

If a customer is running open source Samba, they are supported by the open source community. If a customer is running HP's CIFS product then HP will support them, even in mission critical environments.

As for feature differences, HP initially made some changes to open source Samba when we first began offering CIFS which differentiated our product from open source. However, we fed those enhancements to the open source community and I believe most of them have been incorporated in the open source version.

Regarding flexibility of configuration, I don't know of any differences between the two. Both versions support configuration via the SWAT tool, both have detailed logging built in, etc.

One reason that I've heard some customers give for running open source Samba over CIFS is that they can get their hands on newer versions of the code sooner via open source than from HP's CIFS product. While this is true, there are very good reasons for that.

As I stated earlier, HP stands behind the CIFS product and supports CIFS in mission critical environments. In order for us to feel comfortable offering this level of support, we quantify and qualify new versions of Samba for a good period of time before judging it ready for our customers. There are many times during these qualification periods that we encounter defects that need to be resolved in the open source code (and which we feed back to the open source community) before we're willing to release a new version to our customers.

Those are the differences from my perspective between the two, and why I always recommend customers run the HP-provided CIFS on HP-UX systems over Samba.

Hope this helps,

Dave

[R. Sri Ram Kishore_1]

Hi Tamer,

If you want to run CIFS/Samba on a production system running HP-UX, then my vote is for CIFS, simply because it is supported by HP. Configuration wise, both support SWAT, a real cool tool to configure Samba/CIFS... so that should not be an issue.

HTH.

Regards,
Sri Ram

[Tamer Shaalan]

Thanks Dave , Sri .....

Tamer.

[Steven E. Protter]

CIFS is the right tool for many jobs.

If you have a windows environment you can set it up to authenticate users off a windows primary domain controlller.

You can if you wish use it to REPLACE a Windows Primary Domain Controller.

Or you can just use smbpasswd to create authentication data for individual users.

SEP

[Zeev Schultz]

However if you seek performance I suggest
to consider other possibilities.rsync,ftp.
And again for performance,use security=DOMAIN
if possible and not SERVER.

rgds

Zeev

[Jeff_Traigle]

The only reason you'd want to use Samba instead of CIFS is if you must integrate into an Active Directory infrastructure in native mode, meaning no WINS as far as I know. CIFS is based on Samba 2.2.8a, which does not support this. Samba 3.0.X does. Anyone know when HP might be moving to the 3.0.X version in their CIFS product?

[Brian Hackley]

Jeff,

HP has a "Technology Preview" Samba 3.x version of CIFS on http://software.hp.com but it has a caveat regarding support. Basically HP is not supporting 3.x yet but is very interested in any feedback on the early bits.

Regards,

-> Brian Hackley

p.s. Here is the link to the product blurb:
http://software.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=CIFSTP3