[TriLUG] RFOpinion: Best linux-linux network file sharing

[Jos Purvis via TriLUG]

A lot depends on the use case — these days I use both SMB/CIFS and NFS depending on what I'm using the file-share for. If the only thing I care about is the *file content*, SMB/CIFS works great and is pretty trivial to set up — this works great for having my music collection on a NAS and letting the workstation in my office stream stuff off it while I'm working, for instance. Although it's a pain in the neck for oddball filenames, SMB/CIFS is otherwise a functional lingua franca for network-mountable filesystems[0]. I did try using SSHFS for this at one point, but (and perhaps this was the client/platform I was using) I found it added a lot of bandwidth and performance overhead without a lot of added benefit on a local network. That may have improved since, though — I haven't played with it in a few years now.

Sometimes the file *metadata* are critical, though, and SMB/CIFS doesn't work well for that. As an example, I have a Docker swarm at work that needs synced filesystem content so that when a container moves from one node to another, its local persistent config files are in the right spot with the right permissions to make the transition seamless. For that, I have an NFS share that the swarm nodes all mount to /opt/docker [1]. It wasn't particularly hard to set up (and it's over a closed network so I'm less concerned about playing whack-a-mole with all of NFS's accumulated security gotchas) and it does the job, but it's definitely more than I'd want to do for casual use.

  -- Jos

[0] ...after subjecting smb.conf to a fair amount of percussive maintenance, particularly for Apple clients.
[1] It's interesting: I can actually hear the collective screams of horror from here...or that's just my brain after dealing with our health insurance, one.

On Mon, Mar 17, 2025, at 14:51, Brian via TriLUG wrote:
> Hi gang,
>
> Is [the latest version of] NFS still considered the best way to do 
> network filesharing between two similar Linux systems on a local 
> network?  If not, what's the groupthink on the best choice, given:
>
> - Source filesystem is ext4
> - Bandwidth efficiency is not a priority
> - Robustness against flaky network IS a priority
> - UIDs probably don't match between systems
>
> Cheers,
> -Brian
>
>
>
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