[Gllug] Netatalk or NFS better than SAMBA/CIFS for Macs with CentOS 5 server?

[John Edwards]

On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 11:49:41AM +0100, gvim wrote:
> I'm rethinking the wisdom of having iMacs connecting to SAMBA shares
> on a CentOS 5 server vs. NFS or Netatalk/AFP. There seem to be
> complexities with the HFS+/CIFS mix which affects the storage of
> HFS+ file attributes and differing unicode implementations which
> makes me nervous as at least one workstation occasionally uses a
> Korean locale. The server is to be backed up to an ext3-formatted
> drive so it's essential that attributes are stored accurately at
> least within the initial transfer of files between the server and
> workstations.
> 
> Anyone had any experience in deciding between these options within a
> similar network? Originally the network was designed with SAMBA to
> support several Windows workstations but the office was converted to
> iMacs a while back so Windows support is not important.

I've got not experience with different Unicode locales, but in general
your choice for Mac file sharing really depends on who your users are
and the size and resources of the network.

I would only Netatalk where you have an existing Netatalk
infrastructure in place for older Macs. Even Apple don't recommend
it's use any more and use SMB/CIFS for their file servers.

SMB/CIFS works well and file servers can use Zeroconf/Bonjour/Avahi to
broadcast their presence to the Macs. If you are using Samba with Mac
OS X 10.6 ("Snow Leopard") machines I would recommend turning off the
"unix extensions" option unless you really need it. It tends to lead
to Macs setting different file ownership and permissions to the Samba
defaults.

NFS can work well for machines which all use the same central list of
users and UIDs (eg LDAP, Open Directory, etc), but that is unlikely in
a small network.

I would also not use NFS on laptops that are likely to be moved
without unmounting the NFS mounts as this will throw up an error
when they are used later.

There are also security problems with NFS such as having to trust that
the users on the workstation are really who they claim to be. Using
Kerberos is a possible solution, but not simple to setup.


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|    John Edwards   Email: john at cornerstonelinux.co.uk    |
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