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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?"
Think of how cool it would be if HP, DELL, Alien Ware, etc. shipped all of their computers with a Linux interaction kit full of programs that would allow windows users to interact with Linux boxes using opensource protocals. The computers would still interact with windows boxes int he normal way but could use the open source methodes to.
Another factor involved in using NFS with Windows clients is the security model involved. To expand on Jeremy Allison's excellent comment, the NFS security model relies totally on the UID at the client. Since there is no native concept of a UID in Windows (plus the fact that the Win9x branch doesn't have good user privileges separation in any case), this means that you need a separate login from the Windows PC to the NFS server, using a system known as PC-NFS originally created by Sun. There is an open source pcnfsd daemon that will handle this at the server end, but the client piece is not free, and the whole thing is a PITA to set up, and is one more thing that can go wrong on a fragile Windows client system. Much better to use Samba on the server and not have to rely on yet another skanky layer. (Been there, done that, have the therapist bills to prove it :-P)
FWIW, the Mac OS up through version 9.2 has pretty much the same set of issues. Mac OS X, being Unix-based, has NFS server and client support natively.
--Paul