Samba or NFS on Windows Decision

[Leon A. Howorth]

I am trying to determine which might be the most robust and reliable solution for sharing files from a Windows 2000 server to an HP-UX 11i system over a Wide Area Network. I am considering either an NFS server product for the Windows box or Samba on the HP-UX box. I realize the administrative implications are quite different, but the primary criteria is a reliable Frame-Relay WAN solution.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

I would not suggest NFS over WAN though it is not officially the stance of HP.

SAMBA may not be a bad idea compared to NFS in my view.

-Sri

[S.K. Chan]

Our office has been using Samba for connection/file-sharing between different geographical site and from my experience as a user it's quite stable. The underlying network infrastructure would have to be robust and reliable obviously for this to work.

[Nick Wickens]

We have been using Samba but running on a Linux red hat server for file sharing between our NT and HP-UX 10.20 systems for about three years now without problem because back then we had some now forgotten issue with NFS and NT 4.

Now that Samba comes with 11i as CIFS/9000 I will shortly be dropping the Linux box in favour of running it under HP-UX finally.

[Shannon Petry]

Windows NFS emulator is not nearly as stable as Samba. I have already had 2 sites try and implement this, and almost weekly it requires reconfiguration as it looses it's configuration somewhere/somehow.

The underlying WAN/LAN circuit should have little to do with it unless you are completely blocking netbios calls. In Win2K they use Netbios over TCP/IP, and routers/firewalls can be configured to block this traffic as well as ignore the non-routable netbios.

Regards,
Shannon

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I have used both CIFS/9000 and NFS over frame-relay with good results - as long as you have a stable network. Both of these continue to function (albeit more slowly) over the backup ISDN links. If you choose the NFS server approach, you might consider the Omni-NFS package from http://www.xlink.com. That has been a solid performer for my environment. I think I would lean towards the Samba/CIFS 9000 approach.

Some of your biggest headaches are going to come from things like CR/LF vs LF termination and filenames. I am still in amazement that anybody considers whitespace in pathnames to be a good idea.

[Wodisch]

Hi,

since NFS uses 32K blocks these days, CIFS/9000 (=Samba) would be my recommendation over WAN (smaller packets, less re-transmission - NFS packets will be re-transmitted completly, all 32KB, even only one WAN-packet was dropped).

FWIW,
Wodisch

[Anil C. Sedha · Accepted solution]

I would suggest NFS is not a good solution for sharing across WAN's.

People having very good lines to share data across WAN may be good. But is not a suggestive solution for all scenarios.

The best option would be according to me, to use SAMBA.

Regards,
Anil

[Leon A. Howorth]

The opinions seem to be in favor of SAMBA (i.e., CIFS/9000) for file sharing over WAN circuits. In my case the Windows box would be the server and the HP-UX 11i box would be the client, so I would primarily be interested in the CIFS/9000 client functionality. Thanks very much for the replies.

[Ray Brewer]

In my experience NFS between HP-UX and Windows is a bit clumsy. It works but it's not very robust exspecialy across a WAN. I would suggest Samba or HP's CIFS/9000.

[Shannon Petry]

Both CIFS and SAMBA have the same client functionality. I think it was obvious from your question that the windows box was to be the server ;/

Best of luck!
Shannon