What is the Best Remote Filesystem?

Posted by Cliff on Thursday December 18, 2003 @02:04AM from the sucking-your-files-through-a-straw dept.

GaelenBurns asks: "I've got a project that I'd like the Slashdot community's opinion of. We have two distant office buildings and a passel of windows users that need to be able to access the files on either office's Debian server from either location through Samba shares. We tend to think that AFS would be the best choice for mounting a remote file system and keeping data synchronized, but we're having trouble finding documentation that coherently explains installing AFS. Furthermore, NFS doesn't seem like a good option, since I've read that it doesn't fail gracefully should the net connection ever drop. Others, such as Coda and Intermezzo, seem to be stuck in development, and therefore aren't sufficiently stable. I know tools for this must exist, please enlighten me."

2 of 72 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Samba by fluor2 · 2003-12-18 02:14 · Score: 4, Interesting

It looks to me that both AFS and NFS are kind'a outdated. SAMBA 3 combines NTLMv2 or kerberos encrypted passwords. I like that.
So why not use what you have already by Halvard · 2003-12-18 02:47 · Score: 4, Interesting

Then you don't have to syncronize.

If you haven't already installed SSH on a machine in both locations, do so.

Follow the "Setting up Samba over SSH Tunnel mini-HOWTO" by Mark Williamson . Then you can use the server on each side to share out the files on the other side and not even change anything about how your users do anything. It's very simple to set up. It's 3 steps on each side plus adding it into a log in script or mapping on the individual machines. So you should be ready in 5 minutes.

If you still want to syncronize, there are tons of tools to do that including Unison.