linux as file server

[Guest_imported]

I am quite fresh to linux except that I have use SCO about
five years ago. Every thing has gone from my mind. Take
me as a freshman please. If I tried to set up linux as a file
server, will it be any better than W2k or Novell? (I personally
hate M$, because Bill is trying to rob everybody's pocket).
Any good reference book for starter will be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

 

[marsd]

I don't know about "better", but alot of people here seem
to like it;-).
As a file server you have a heck of a lot of choices, and
a great deal of flexibility.
With NFS and coda you have network filesystems that are
in wide use for *nix, samba provides file service for
windows smb/cifs clients, and dynamic file services like
rsync are neat too.
My advice is to pick up a book for the distribution you
decide on. SAMS and other publishers come out with these
all the time.
O'reilly has books available for nfs and samba for gritty details.
The man pages and howtos are a great help also, and are free.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

If you've talking vs W2K and Netware then you must mean for windoze clients. To all intents and purposes this means using samba (a smb/cifs file server & pdc/bdc) on the linux box. Its a bit out of date, but there is an online version of the O'reilly 'Using samba' book here -->

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/samba/chapter/book/index.html

. See also -->

http://us1.samba.org/samba/docs/Samba-HOWTO-Collection.html

. I should also mention that there are browser-based guis for easy admin, notably swat and webmin. There are some other gui toolz here -->

http://linux.tucows.com/internet/nfs.html

.

Will it be better than W2K or Netware ? Well, I won't say anything against netware except that it's a commercial product but for M$/W2K - imagine a server that is nearly 100% reliable, doesn't blue screen on you every five minutes, and doesn't need re-booting every time you configure everything..... OK I'm exaggerating a little but you get the point no doubt.

Regards

 

[jrjuiliano]

Isn't the only real caveat that you have enable NetBIOS on the network in order for Windoze users to connect?

And here I was trying to get away from that... ;-) J.R. Juiliano
Information Systems Specialist
Tri-City Emergency Medical Group

 

[marsd]

Netbios over tcp/ip..but thats a problem you are going
to face with smb/cifs file services of any kind.

I find running samba and eliminating other, noisy, windows
file servers, is a good compromise. It's better than legacy
ipx novell anyway.

 

[ifincham]

Hi,

Just to clarify on the NBT - you only need TCP/IP on the samba server. Samba (& M$ servers for that matter) generate and encapsulate the legacy netbios protocols in regular TCP packets for transportation over IP - especially to allow routing because netbios/netbeui is not a routable protocol on its own. Its all transparent really.

What people sometimes find a bit tricky is the netbios names secario. On a windows box there is a parameter for 'computer name' or suchlike - this is the netbiosname and is the one used in the unc syntax, i.e. \\netbiosname\share . For non-local access, this can be mapped to an IP address with WINS in a very similar way to DNS but the netbiosname is not (necessarily) the same as the same windows machine's IP hostname. Anyway, windows clients do netbios broadcasts looking for netbiosnames & suffixes to do things like locate a pdc, find a server, etc. Samba needs to provide a similar netbios resolution service which it does through the nmbd daemon - a samba implementation of a wins server. Of course you can always use the lmhosts (lan manager hosts) file on the windows side as substitute for wins (same as 'hosts' instead of dns) or even just the ip in the unc - \\172.16.16.1\share .

So, to sum up - you do not need a netbios protocol stack on the samba server only a bit of name-resolution tweaking.

Regards