[inthewind]

Can someone chime in, with the pros and cons of each network filesystem. And which is a good fit for Linux - or rather for those OSs that don't need to cooperate with Windows? Was NFS ever updated - or replaced? How much of SMB is now open after court rulings? And is their one that is technically better than another?

[wazoox]

My experience with Mac connecting to Linux file servers, is that OS X NFS client performance is fine (110 MB/s over Giga ethernet), and SMB performance sucks badly (70 MB/s on GigE, comparable to the poor old cranky windows XP). AFP performance with netatalk is comparable to NFS, but much more resource intensive on the server. Therefore I always use NFS shares between Linux and Macs.

[inthewind]

Thanks for the reply. How sucky is something like an SSH mount with fuse, or is that not comparable?

[wazoox]

Sorry for the late reply; from my experience anything FUSE-based sucks too much to qualify as even barely usable.

[astrodust]

NFS was never especially good, many a system admin would spend hours upon hours trying to fix it when it malfunctioned for no specific reason, but it was just the only viable option for many years. The alternatives were either research projects, or proprietary protocols like Novell used.

SMB isn't so much better as more widely supported.

[lmm]

SMB at least avoids the stupid NFS behaviour where any program that tries to read while the server's offline uninterruptibly hangs.

[nitrogen]

That's a configurable option (mount -o soft). On Ubuntu, the nfs(5) manpage has more information. This option is a good thing in a strict client/server scenario where the client should not lose data even if the server is rebooted. Years ago I watched an NFS mount in an old broadcast video setup recover unimpeded after its target system was rebooted.

[nvr219]

Use ReiserFS

[inthewind]

Is ReiserFS a network file system?

[Demiurge]

I heard it's a killer.