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[ProgSoc] NFS vs Samba



Hi all,
Firstly, thanks to Nathan for the excellent suggestion of Clarkconnect for my 
new router/fileserver box, it's working perfectly.  However, that does give 
rise to my next question.  I've got a 280gb ext3 LVM partition on the new 
machine which I need to share to the computers on my network.  Most of these 
are windows boxes (plus one xbox), basically meaning that they need to use 
samba to talk to the server's share.  However, my desktop is a linux/windows 
dual boot (running linux most of the time, naturally), meaning I've got a 
choice there over mounting the share as an smbfs/cifs partition, or using nfs 
to mount it.

Based on the absolute insistence of Myles that Samba "craps all over" NFS and 
does absolutely everything NFS does, I first just set things up using cifs.  
However, I've run into two problems:
- Firstly, it's slow.  Not horrible, but it tops out at about 6MB/s on my 
100mbit network, well below what one would think it "should" be.
- Secondly, it doesn't seem to quite do everything and allow working as if the 
mount were just another drive.  In particular when I recently tried to start 
a new bittorrent download into the shared partition (uh... I needed some 
linux ISOs) azureus refused, claiming "directory creation 
failed /mnt/myshare/mydir (allocateFiles 
new:/mnt/myshare/mydir/myfile)" (with names changed of course).

I've since set up NFS, and have to say I'm quite happy with it.  It tops out 
at about 12MB/s, so basically my full 100mbit, and the azureus download 
problem appears to have gone.  However, if I'm just doing something wrong and 
can save bring Samba up to that level, saving me from having to run two file 
serving protocols, I'd much rather do that.  I've done some quick googling 
about with no luck so far, and thought I should ask here, since someone, 
particularly Myles, may well have some suggestions.  Hell, even if I can't 
solve this problem, chances are good of serious flaming appearing.  So, 
anyone run into this sort of thing before?

Thanks in Advance,
-- 
David Edney
President
UTS Programmers' Society

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