Windows NFS Shares

[ottothecow]

I am looking to w ork with some NFS shares on windows.

Primarily I will be running linux so the NFS server would be linux based and I dont have a problem with that (though I might also be interested in a way to make new NFS shares with windows). What I am looking for is the best/easiest to use free NFS client implementation for WinXP. My school looks down upon SMB shares and thus they dont always work right on our network but I have some things that still need to get shared. I need something simple that I can run on my windows box and give to my friends who need acess to my fileserver. I have ftp running but I need filesystem style access on the windows boxes (like the ability to browse to a video in windows and start it playing without downloading it).

So what are my options for NFS Clients/(and server options too I suppose) on windows. My main goals are simple, reliable, fast, and freely available.

 

[Nothinman]

MS SFU is free now, but IMO NFS sucks way too much in general to use it.

 

[Rilex]

MS SFU 3.5 or better yet, Windows 2003 R2.

 

[ottothecow]

I've looked at SFU and I guess I will give it a shot then

What's so bad about NFS...its better than the windows SMB implementation...

What should I use instead that gives me a mountable drive?

 

[randal]

use samba on linux I've seen installations where they use samba instead of nfs on purpose ... I think that's like making a deal with the devil, though

 

[ottothecow]

Oh, samba on linux works just fine. The problem is that I need it mountable on windows and well...windows for some reason sucks at its own protocol.

The only problem with MS SFU is the 200+MB size. It's not exactly a quick and easy fix (though I suppose if I stick the installer on my FTP, it will be quicker). Is there a way to bundle together just the NFS featueres because the people I give this to have no need for any of the other services (and I prefer cygwin).

 

[Nothinman]

What's so bad about NFS...its better than the windows SMB implementation...

No, it's not. NFS uses UDP by default which has no error correction of it's own (new implementations can use TCP but AFAIK most don't support it yet and it's slower), it relies on uids and gids to be synchronized, it exposes the full path of the directory you're exporting and others I can't think of right now. SMB/CIFS may not be a great protocol, but NFS has it's own slew of problems that are, IMO, worse.

 

[ottothecow]

well, since the school is trying to force people to disable windows sharing (since so many people run it completely unsecured), the SMB shares only work half of the time so I have to go with something else...it seems like NFS is the only option

 

[Nothinman]

Well good luck with that NFS may not be CIFS, but it's got it's own can of problems that are worse, IMO.

 

[cmetz]

Nothinman, UDP has a checksum and NFS has retransmission. This corrects errors in the same way as TCP.

NFS < 4 does require UID/GID synchronization. That is annoying, it's fixed in the v4 but v4 is not widely deployed yet. NFS's biggest real weakness is security, and v4 represents a lot of improvement there (basically fixes the security problems).

"it exposes the full path of the directory you're exporting" - please explain.

And what are all these other horrible problems that make it so much worse than SMB/CIFS?

I can name some obvious downsides to SMB/CIFS: generally poor protocol design, poor performance, and especially poor performance over high-latency links.

ottothecow, SFU is a pretty decent client, and the price is right. I don't know if it's possible to separate the pieces for distribution, but you can definitely only install the NFS pieces and not all the other stuff.

 

[Nothinman]

Nothinman, UDP has a checksum and NFS has retransmission. This corrects errors in the same way as TCP.

And it also duplicates parts of TCP inside UDP that weren't there in the first place, might as well just use TCP at that point.

NFS < 4 does require UID/GID synchronization. That is annoying, it's fixed in the v4 but v4 is not widely deployed yet. NFS's biggest real weakness is security, and v4 represents a lot of improvement there (basically fixes the security problems).

Then say I'm using NFS v4 and I have server:/blah mounted locally on /blah, how does it know who I am when I go to read a file if it doesn't tell the server "this is my UID" and the server verifies against it's own database? I guess kerberos or something could be used, but that's a lot to setup just for filesharing.

"it exposes the full path of the directory you're exporting" - please explain.

When I export /mnt/data from my server you have to mount it as server:/mnt/data. With SMB/CIFS you name the exported share whatever you want and can even have seperate permissions for each share even if they export the same directory structure or a subset of another share.

I can name some obvious downsides to SMB/CIFS: generally poor protocol design, poor performance, and especially poor performance over high-latency links.

The protocol may be ugly, but I don't have to deal with it. And CIFS performance isn't that bad. You won't get the full 100% throughput on a 100Mb line, but you'll probably be able to do 80-85% of it.