[TriLUG] sharing out a filesystem to windows and linux

[Blackburn, Marvin]

I got a bit ahead of myself and did not explain this well.
I am building a fileserver to serve NFS to a very old linux system
(which we cannot install samba on).
I also need to share out the same files to a set of windows users via
cifs/samba.

I am building the fileserver from scratch and can load just about
anything I want (most likely rhel 5).  I will then copy the files
to be shared out.  While I'm confident of the NFS part, I didn't know if
you could share out the same files using two different protocols.

The answer appears to be yes, so I'll start working on it.  If anyone
has done this, and pointers would be appreciated.


-----Original Message-----
From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org] On
Behalf Of Kevin Hunter
Sent: Tuesday, February 16, 2010 3:41 PM
To: Triangle Linux Users Group General Discussion
Subject: Re: [TriLUG] sharing out a filesystem to windows and linux

At 3:16pm -0500 Tue, 16 Feb 2010, Marvin Blackburn wrote:
Kevin
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> Currently, we use a commercial tool that lets us do both nfs and cifs;
> however, we are decommissioning this.  We have only one filesystem
that
> needs to do this.

Sounds like you already have NFS good to go, so I think the pointer you
need is to Samba, a CIFS server.

Also, briefly, NFS and CIFS are really "layers" or "masks" over another
filesystem.  That is, the underlying file system on your server will
house the data, and NFS and CIFS simply make it visible (via different
"languages") over the network.

Put differently, both NFS and CIFS can serve the same information, and
at the same time.  All it involves doing is running both services on
your Linux machine.

> The linux based system is very old and really only talks nfs.

I'm not sure what you mean by this last statement.  Are you saying that
you

- Can't update your Linux system?
- That it doesn't have Samba?

My first question is why can't you update the system, if it's so old?
If you can, installing Samba and NFS should be almost a dead simple
"repository: please install nfs and samba" command.

If you can't, then you'll need to find a way to install both on the
machine.  This is 100% possible, but you'll need to give us more info,
or figure out the specifics on your own.