network file systems?

hi...

what is the most reliable and stable network file systems, that support auto
mounting?


--
mfg
Joe

for email contact snip '.nospamATunknow.' from the adress-field

Joe McGlatze <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:
> what is the most reliable and stable network file systems, that support auto
> mounting?

ext2.

--
__Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/

There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not
want merely because you think it would be good for him. -- Robert Heinlein

On Thu, 24 Jun 2004 17:58:22 +0200, Pascal Bourguignon wrote:

> Joe McGlatze <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:
>> what is the most reliable and stable network file systems, that support auto
>> mounting?
>
> ext2.

Huh? From the network side, it would be NFS (my favorite) or Samba (aka
SMB for Windoze shares), etc. I have never used AFS (Andrew File System,
from CMU) but I've heard some good things about it. There are more
esoteric systems like CODA, which was designed to allow intermittent
connectivity, as in travelling laptops/notebooks.

On the server, you can use any native file system. The network sharing
software really does not care. The native file system gets mounted by the
kernel and is read as any other normal file system. The file sharing
software is actually a normal user program on the server. It runs and
shares files just like any other program. No file system restrictions.

I don't know if ext2 is better than ext3 or reiserfs on Linux? Since this
is a Linux group, I assume one is not asking about file systems (like ufs
on Solaris) on other O/S network file system servers. I do know that
recovery after crash (important?) is much faster on reiserfs (dunno ext3).

I have been running reiserfs on Linux for a couple of years now. Sometimes
I share it via NFS. Haven't seen major problems. Most of the time I access
(via automounts) NFS from a Sun Solaris server. This is my personal (and
business) system. In effect, my personal computer is a network.

--
Juhan Leemet
Logicognosis, Inc.

hi...

i'm sorry about my unclear question...
i actually meant, what kind of software be the best for sharing files
between linux machines...

in the past, when i needed to copy files i used 'scp', but i came up with
the problem that one of my machines hard locks (have to pull the
reset-switch) whenever i transfer larger files.

i also thought about using an central managed automounting mechanism, to
make file accesibility easier...

in solving my scp-problem i bothered with copying files via samba (smb &
cifs), which both failed. smb in cause of the 2gb filesize limit, and cifs
gave a big bunch of failure messages...

so i decided to fire up a nfs server & client, and copied the data that
way...

now i want a really stable and reliable solution, since i'm reinstalling the
two machines to gentoo...
what is the best software for my automount/file share thoughts?
--
mfg
Joe

for email contact snip '.nospamATunknow.' from the adress-field

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 01:47:40 +0200, Joe McGlatze wrote:
> i'm sorry about my unclear question...
> i actually meant, what kind of software be the best for sharing files
> between linux machines...

I would say NFS in the *nix world and/or Samba if you have Windoze.

[snippage]
> so i decided to fire up a nfs server & client, and copied the data that
> way...
>
> now i want a really stable and reliable solution, since i'm reinstalling
> the two machines to gentoo...
> what is the best software for my automount/file share thoughts?

Yeah, I think NFS is the *nix standard way of doing that kind of thing,
for the past 20 years or so? There is some noise (from Solaris folks)
about Linux NFS being "busted", but I'm not sure if it's NFS or tftp that
they have problems with (typically network installs?).

My main server is Sun Solaris, so I cannot comment on Linux NFS server
stability. I have used it occasionally for sharing files. Haven't noticed
much in the way of problems, but haven't really done a lot there. I use
NFS mounts on Linux and Solaris clients all the time. Works great!

What you might consider emulating is the Sun Solaris way of handling /home
directories, which I think is kind of clever/nice. On the NFS server all
of the home directories are mounted under /export/home/<name>. They can
actually be in any arbitrary place, but that is the common location. Then
via NIS one provides a few auto mounter maps (auto_master and auto_home,
and also auto_direct, if you implement that?). If the client machines run
the automounter (autofs or autofs4) then it will "own" the /home directory
(and anything else specified in auto_master) and automagically mount your
personal (or any other, with permissions) home directory to /home/<name>
on your local machine. This is a neat way to have your home directories on
a server, and have them automagically mounted on whatever machine you
login. You can be logged in to several machines simultaneously.

With automounter and NFS and NIS, you do your configuration updates on
your NIS server. You don't have to run around and reconfigure each machine.

It takes a bit of reading to get your head around the automounter, and
NFS, and NIS (to align uid and gid and serve auto* maps, etc.). However,
I think it is worth it, for a much friendlier networking environment.

Read up on: nfs, yp (for Yellow Pages, the original name for NIS), autofs.

--
Juhan Leemet
Logicognosis, Inc.