[nzlug] samba: puzzled user...

[Daniel Lawson]

>
> nfs failed for me, can't remember why, but it did. I needed network  
> mounts
> so went to cifs and haven't looked back. I have three servers and two
> clients with multimedia files (music and video) all joined up by  
> cifs and
> it works a treat. And unlike nfs doesn't hang forever if one of the
> machines goes down.


You can of course tweak that behaviour. Look at the NFS man page for  
options for intr, soft, hard (the default), and retry. These are set  
on the cmdline or via fstab, just like any other mount options. The  
intr mount option is the most useful, as it lets you interrupt a  
failed NFS attempt, and the soft option will send an I/O error to the  
calling program rather than keep retrying.


As a general note, I've seen major problems when using the old smb  
kernel module to mount shares from a windows server to a linux box for  
nightly backup purposes. The sort of problem that works fine when you  
run the backup manually, but fails 80% of the time at 3am.  Switching  
to the new cifs module, which most distributions have probably done  
for you, solved the problem.


> PS I am not trying to start a flame fest about the pros and cons of  
> nfs vs
> cifs, just saying that the samba implementation of cifs is stable and
> useful for me between linux and freebsd machines.

Understood, and I'm not trying to perpetuate one. Just commenting :)