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

Linux Interaction Kit

[Speedy8]

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.

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

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

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.

Re:No

[red_dragon]

Are there any Open Source luminaries that *don't* read Slashdot?

You mean, besides the Slashdot editors? ;)

Do the smart thing.

[Wakko Warner]

Use Kerberos or LDAP for authentication. There are plenty of payware NFS clients for windows, but why would you use the same server to serve both UNIX and Windows filesystems? Unless you're simply sharing data that can be accessed and modified by both types of client, there's really no point, is there?

- A.P.

Security considerations

[plsuh]

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

Re:Security considerations

[0x0d0a]

To expand on Jeremy Allison's excellent comment, the NFS security model relies totally on the UID at the client.

Might this have changed when they moved to NFSv4? It uses GSSAPI, which presumably means it uses Kerberos principals instead of UIDs to identify users on a client machine.

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