Will,

It is not true that CIFS connections "stay broken" as you state. We are exclusively a CIFS environment and we have frequent CIFS disconnects. There are a number of reasons for this, and it is true that CIFS behaves very differently then NFS. However, I think Auspex has a lot to prove when it makes the NFS claim of better "results" whatever, that means. A CIFS client will reconnect automatically to the CIFS share as long as that share remains available to the NT domain.

-----Original Message----- From: Will Harper [mailto:willh@infi.net] Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 1999 10:26 AM To: 'P.S.Jones'; toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: Accessing CIFS shares with Unix authentication

I can't answer your question directly, but I have "heard" that CIFS is a problem. It works ok, when it is working, but when it hiccups, it is not easily corrected. When a CIFS connection is broken, it stays broken.

A vendor's engineer (Auspex) told me that he had found that an NFS client on NT actually provided better end results for all of the H-A storage systems that he had worked with. He suggested Samba or Hummingbird. NFS, he explained, keeps trying to reconnect until you fix the problem, and then NFS fixes itself.

Will Harper, MCSE

-----Original Message----- From: P.S.Jones [SMTP:P.S.Jones@durham.ac.uk] Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 1999 11:01 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Accessing CIFS shares with Unix authentication

We have a Network Appliance 740 Filer for evaluation and want to try it in a mixed Unix and NT environment. I think we can handle the Unix side without any real problems. What we are struggling with is how to provide access to the CIFS file store to our NT clients by supplying Unix credentials? I'll explain this in a bit more detail.

Our NT service has no user accounts, or rather it has one, a general auto logon account. Within this account's logon script we prompt for authentication details (real user ID and password) and then map network shares against our existing Netware 3.1 servers. In the summer we plan to retire Netware 3.1 and provide the home file store from a Unix like system. We've tried Samba and quite like it but we want to evaluate the Filer as well. But how can we map a CIFS share from the Filer using just Unix credentials?

I'm trying to read the documentation at the moment and have come across the usermap.cfg file mechanism, but this doesn't seem quite appropriate since we don't have any NT accounts. I wonder if anyone on this list has solved a problem like this? Are we going to have to run Samba anyway for the authentication?

Any comments gratefully received.

-- Paul Jones, ITS, University of Durham, South Road, Durham DH1 3LE Email: P.S.Jones@durham.ac.uk Phone/Fax: 0191 374 2879/3741