[Techtalk] Which Network File System?

Kathryn Andersen kat_lists at katspace.homelinux.org
Thu Dec 6 05:28:31 UTC 2007


Worthy and knowledgable peoples,

I have a very small network at home (two desktops and one laptop)
and up to now I've been syncing files with unison, rsync and scp.
But now I'm wondering if setting up a network file system might be the
way to go.  I can see three things that it would be useful for:

A. Comparing and updating files (for example, doing gvim -d on files
in /etc from different machines)
B. Serving files, such as music files, stored on one machine and used
on another.
C. Similar to B; being able to back up files (transparently) from
multiple machines.

Another factor is whether the given file system will or will not support
Extended Attributes.

On the upside, all my systems are running GenToo, so it shouldn't be too
difficult to set up those filesystems which require reconfiguring of the
kernel.

I've been googling, and there are a bewildering array of choices, but I
haven't really been able to find much by the way of comparisons between
them.  The following is more or less what I've gathered:

nfs:
old and venerable, works everywhere, well-supported, but doesn't deal
well with disconnection, insecure, may or may not support extended
attributes (I got conflicting info on that)

samba:
Oriented towards sharing with MS-Windows, advisable not to bother
if you're not dealing with MS-Windows.

sshfs: (FUSE filesystem over SSH)
Very easy to set up for a single user, no need for server setup,
secure, not good for global sharing, *may* be slow

afs/OpenAFS:
ancient and venerable, complicated to set up, many features
(also GenToo doesn't appear to have the current version)

Coda:
modern, may not be stable, may not be well-supported, secure,
disconnectable (also, GenToo doesn't appear to have the current version)

Worthy people, can you give me guidance?

Kathryn Andersen
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