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
This is a feature of CIFS as designed by Microsoft - it is a stateful protocol, while NFS is stateless. The same situation applies if you lose your connection to an NT server.
The use of emulation software is not a high performance one, and requires other compromises.
At 01:25 pm 3/10/99 -0500, Will Harper wrote:
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
Andrew Bond writes:
This is a feature of CIFS as designed by Microsoft - it is a stateful protocol, while NFS is stateless.
Ah yes. That would be the same "feature" that made SysVr3's RFS so popular and long-lived. :-)
The same situation applies if you lose your connection to an NT server.
And that only happens once or twice a week, what with NT's long uptimes.
The use of emulation software is not a high performance one, and requires other compromises.
But the use of NT Domains along with Unix creates even bigger headaches. Just try to sync /etc/passwd with NT authentication. Maybe LDAP will fix this?
After 5 years of occasionally needing to tie NT boxes into Unix networks, I still find that the only answer is to minimize the number of NT servers. My happiness approaches acceptable levels as the number of NT boxes (especially servers) approaches zero.
NFS on an NT workstation is workable and a Good Idea.
-bmw
And that only happens once or twice a week, what with NT's long uptimes.
This is long? :)
But the use of NT Domains along with Unix creates even bigger headaches. Just try to sync /etc/passwd with NT authentication.
Actually NetApp has a tool (called SecureShare Migrate, available on the NOW site), which can be used to sync NT user and group databases with passwd and group files.
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.
NFS and CIFS have very different philosophies and design goals, and -- as a result -- they have different strengths and weaknesses.
The stateless NFS model is ideal in an environment where clients fail, servers fail, networks fail, and yet you still want to get some work done. To achieve this fault resiliency, the NFS designers were willing to make (minor) compromises in file system semantics.
The session based CIFS model is ideal when you want exactly the right file system semantics, especially in areas like file locking. The session based model also allows some cool performance optimizations (like opportunistic caching). Of course, the downside of a sessions is that when a session dies, you've got trouble.
So if you are trying to set up some kind of an fault resilient cluster, I can imagine that using NFS in an NT environment might actually make sense, assuming that NFS satisfies the application you are clustering, and assuming that you don't mind the administrative overhead of managing the PC-NFS software.
On the other hand, CIFS will probably do better if you've got lots of NT users running lots of NT applications. You'll get better file system semantics than NFS can offer, and hence less user confusion, and you won't have the management overhead of maintaining NFS on the NT clients.
Dave
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Andrew Bond -
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Will Harper