NFS/NIS Recommendations for Windows?

Fembot asks: "The Samba team are doing a great job, but I can't help but feel that making Unix machines serve Windows-based protocols is the wrong approach. Back in the days of Windows95 it shipped with an NFS client on the CD which could be installed optionaly. Are there open source (or even just free as in beer) NFS clients for Windows 2000/XP, and is it possible to authenticate users on Windows desktops via NIS?"

Comments

No

[joto]

There are no free software, open source, or non-crippled NFS clients for Windows (at least that has been the story for quite some time...)

Your options are to either

1. write one :-)
2. buy a client for each machine from one of these vendors: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7.
3. Buy a NFS/SMB gateway from one of the vendors above (or make one with Samba)
4. Use both samba and NFS on the server
5. Simply use samba

When using both NFS and Samba there might be some tricky locking issues. At least it used to be recommended against. I don't know if that's true anymore, but you should be aware of it. If you only share disks readonly, then you will of course be safe.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know if this is what you mean by LSA but there is a cool looking project called pGina [plu.edu]. The about page shows:

For instance, should an administrator wish to use an existing Unix server, and its existing base of users, to authenticate access to Windows 2000 machines there are few options. The methods employed may range from using a Windows 2000 server for authentication and having the administrator maintain identical lists of usernames/ passwords on each server, to using Samba to emulate a Windows NT 4 Server. However, each method has its drawbacks and limitations. Ideally the administrator should be able to setup a standard naming service, such as NIS (Network Information Services) or LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol), on ANY type of server and have all clients, regardless of OS revision, access that single repository.

Sorry for the flood but it looks interesting to anybody wanting to do this sort of stuff.

Thanks for Samba too :)

Don't use NFS, then

[0x0d0a]

There are no free software, open source, or non-crippled NFS clients for Windows

Yup. But if you're willing to use AFS instead of NFS, there's OpenAFS , an AFS client that's available for Windows, MacOS X, Linux, and just about every platform out there. It's free and open source, plus pretty well designed. IBM pushes and supports it, and MIT and CMU (plus a lot of other places, but it gives you an idea of how much approval it gets from people in the know) both use it for their storage system.

AFS will also buy you a seriously secure system and better performance (thanks to leases and other good design features) than you'll get from CIFS (Windows filesharing). I'm pretty sure that NFS, despite the large number of changes in recent versions, is still outperformed by AFS.

It can be more a bear to set up, since you'll probably want to also set up a dedicated KDC, but at least you're doing things the Right Way.

Coda is supposed to be the successor to AFS, but I really haven't heard of people using it much, and Intermezzo doesn't have the backing that AFS does.

Oh, yes. AFS can do distributed storage, so it can (magic boss-exciting word approaching) *scale* really well. :-)

Re:Good reason for this....

[duffbeer703]

I'll bite...

1. NFS file-locking is pitiful
2. Stale mounts.
3. Poor host-based security vs. SMB
4. Inferior performance

nfs for win32 [opensource, freeware, commerical]

[develop]

[1] http://opensource.franz.com/nfs/
nfs is an NFS server for Windows written in Allegro Common Lisp.
[2] War NFS Daemon written by Jarle Aase (freeware)
[3] http://www.labtam-inc.com/
commerical