Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4417 mails)

[Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>]

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On Fri, 07 Nov 2003 23:00:42 +0000
James Ogley <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > Can someone point me to something that describes what an NFS is and
> > how it works? 
> 
> NFS stands for Network File System, it allows you to mount filesystems
> from other machines.  Rather than me spend ages typing a description
> of how it works (I wrote about it way back when I was Uni in a
> Distributed Systems exam - ah, memories...), there's a lot of
> documentation at http://nfs.sourceforge.net/
One addition to James' reply. NFS allows you to export directory trees
from one system that can be mounted on other machines. This is similar
to mounting Windows shares. NFS has been around since the mid-1980s and
was developed by Sun (although other vendors, such as Cadmus) had
similar systems. 

If you want to share files between Linux (or Linux and Unix) systems,
then NFS is the way to do it. But, if you want to share files with a
Windows box then use Samba. In both cases the client machine mounts the
exported directory as a file system. While Windows can use NFS, it is an
addon where the Linux kernel can support both NFS as well as SMBFS (eg.
Windows shares). 


- -- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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