Based on my own experience I can only agree to what Kurt is saying. I have a renderfarm with 10 rendering machines and 1 fileserver, 1 dedicated user which runs the renderings (and therefore produces the image files). Authentication is done via NIS (NIS master is the fileserver). The clients access the fileserver's share (image directory) via smbmount Since postproduction takes place on a seperate fast Windows machine all I have to do is make the image directory available via SMB to them as well and for convenience I use the same user on the windows box. As far as encryption is concerned I don't really need it since everything takes place in a LAN which is protected by a firewall. I have this setup running since 6 month and never experienced any problem. I am able to add more clients at any time without much trouble (actually when adding a client I use Norton Ghost to produce an identical copy of an existing and fully installed (master-)client and only have to change name and IP address after the first boot and viola - all done :-) Hope this waan't too OT ;-) Erwin --- Kurt Seifried wrote:
Oddly enough you may want to consider SMB. Good support by Windows and UNIX, authentication can be done securely if you do not allow unencrypted logins, and you can SSL encrypt the whole shebang if you want to.
Kurt Seifried, kurt@seifried.org A15B BEE5 B391 B9AD B0EF AEB0 AD63 0B4E AD56 E574 http://www.seifried.org/security/