On Tue, Jul 7, 2020 at 11:26 AM David C. Rankin <drankinatty@suddenlinkmail.com> wrote:
On 07/07/2020 01:52 AM, Roger Oberholtzer wrote:
Why NFS? Mainly because it is easy to share and unshare directories independently. The server maintains a disk array with 24 removable disks (hot swappable). These disks come and go independently. So they need to be exported and unexported independently. I do not see how to do this with SAMBA. All is in one big file and they are shared and unshared together. We do not want to disrupt some disks while changing others. So NFS seemed a way to go. If I have missed something in SAMBA, I would be ever so happy. That was question two.
There are pluses and minuses for NFS usage. About 15+ years ago, I went to straight smb and samba for Windows Linux filesystem interoperability. Somewhere around Samba 2.02a on either SuSE 7 or 8 pro. I made the switch and never looked back. Samba still has a "standalone" file-server mode which is what I use (but it has grown way beyond simply file server/filesystem access control to a full blown domain controller (I just don't have a need for that enterprise level interoperability or complexity. The good news is as a file server and SMB application, configuration with the good-ole smb.conf is all that is still required.
smb.conf is in fact the source of the problem. When the disks to share are changing independently, and one cannot interrupt one disk to change the status of another, a single file that controls them all is not a good thing. The exportfs/mount/umount commands operate per disk. That is the main reason I choose NFS. Also, it allowed me to have one file server setup on the disk array server that did not need to care if the client was Linux or Windows. But the ability to manage each disk independently was a big deciding factor. I will report back on what I find relative to Per's suggestion. Can you share the same directory both via NFS and CIFS at the same time? I was trying to avoid this kind of thing.
If your windows NFS connections are flaky, just CIFS mount the windows shares
These are not Windows shares. They are shared by a Linux server. The clients are a mix of Linux and Windows. And the Windows clients are the ones that have some odd stability issue. I don't have any religious connections to NFS or CIFS. I just want whatever is stable and reliable. And that has the disk independence that I require. -- Roger Oberholtzer -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org