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by astrodust 4757 days ago
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.
1 comments
lmm 4757 days ago
SMB at least avoids the stupid NFS behaviour where any program that tries to read while the server's offline uninterruptibly hangs.
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nitrogen 4757 days ago
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.
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