POLL: Which is better... smbfs or cifs?

[Crusty]

So what do you think?

 

[cleverhandle]

I just tried out cifs recently and I don't know much about the technical differences between the two. But using cifs fixed some problems I had with deleting folders off a share (some kind of problem with GNOME and/or fam, from what I could tell) as well as a very strange connection problem that I was never able to fully track down. Apparently, smbfs is basically deprecated in 2.6, so cifs looks to be the wave of the future for cross-platform file sharing.

So, cifs it is.

 

[Crusty]

Originally posted by: cleverhandle
I just tried out cifs recently and I don't know much about the technical differences between the two. But using cifs fixed some problems I had with deleting folders off a share (some kind of problem with GNOME and/or fam, from what I could tell) as well as a very strange connection problem that I was never able to fully track down. Apparently, smbfs is basically deprecated in 2.6, so cifs looks to be the wave of the future for cross-platform file sharing.

So, cifs it is.

Pretty much same boat im in atm. I was using smbfs for my music off my server but randomly xmms would just lock up. Checked my logs and i was getting some smb_get_length errors. So I switched over to cifs and haven't had a problem yet .

Hope it stays this way

 

[n0cmonkey]

NFS

 

[drag]

My understanding that CIFS is the polite way of saying:
SMB + all the sh1t everybody had to do to fix it's problems.

SMBFS in the kernel should be avoided, I beleive. With the 2.6 series it had some security issues resulting from it basicly being unmatained.

So CIFS is the current most usefull filing system that we have for normal setups. I think that SMB vs CIFS are used interchangably..

But I am not realy all that well informed on the subject.

I've been looking at the newer versions of NFS though. Looks like they fixed most of it's problems and should be robust especially if your running a all *nix setup. NFSv3 and NFSv4 stuff... I don't know.

 

[Nothinman]

The SMBFS driver in Linux is deprecated and not maintained, the CIFS one is in developement and should work for most cases. SMBFS also has a max filesize of 2G IIRC, which can be annoying and CIFS has no such limits that I'm aware of.

NFS is worse than both though because the only authentication used is local UID numbers and you have to know the real full path to the exported directory, with SMBFS/CIFS you just need a share name that can be anywhere.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
NFS is worse than both though because the only authentication used is local UID numbers and you have to know the real full path to the exported directory, with SMBFS/CIFS you just need a share name that can be anywhere.

Currently most NFS stuff uses 'AUTH_UNIX' with domain name checking and UID/GID-based authentication (which sucks, because the clients are the ones that set the security).

However NFSv4 supports using more advanced models of authentication such as Kerberos or LIPKEY. Which makes NFS possibly secure enough to be used even out on the internet.

That's what I was thinking about.. But of course this stuff isn't that mature yet, as I understand it. The Linux kernel currently has limited support for it.

Still though, CIFS is the only real practical solution at the current moment.