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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?"
It's interesting to understand the reasons for this.
It isn't because no one wants it, or no Free Software
authors are interested, it's because "the Monopoly" (tm:-)
ie. Microsoft doesn't want you to be able to do this, so
they don't openly release the internal interfaces you need to
use to write such a thing.
They're available under NDA (at least the NFS parts) but
the authentication parts are controlled with an iron fist
(I don't think there are any replacement LSA modules that
will allow NT/W2K/XP to use a NIS or NIS+ server as the
sole authentication source). You see, if you could authenticate
to a NIS or NIS+ server then you wouldn't need to buy those
Windows server licenses and the strategy of leveraging a
desktop monopoly into a server one would be in danger...
This is why people are *really interested* in a Samba PDC.
Regards,
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.