Re: NT Services for UNIX

Adrian Taylor (A.J.Taylor@soton.ac.uk)
Thu, 14 May 1998 10:03:54 +0100 (BST)

From:	Adrian Taylor <A.J.Taylor@soton.ac.uk>
To:	samba-technical@samba.anu.edu.au
Subject: Re: NT Services for UNIX
Date:	Thu, 14 May 1998 10:03:54 +0100 (BST)

Microsoft seem to have decided to reinvent the wheel. Do they
think that by calling what seems to be basically PC-NFS a
'Microsoft friendly' name, that people will rush out and buy it??

Ok, so NFS is a 'nice', reasonably seamless way of exporting files.

To my mind, it has one advantage over samba that will sell it to
the punters...
1. It has the M$ badge - doesn't mean it's any good :-)

The disadvantages :
1. NFS is not 'native' to Windows
2. Security. This isn't so much of a problem in smallish places,
but in our university environment, this can be quite troublesome..
We would have to export our filestore to many thousands of
machines on / off campus, which would be totally out of our
control. One malicious user with a UNIX box (linux, whatever) and
the root password to their own UNIX box can basically do whatever
they like to anybody else's filestore. Not good..
3. It'll cost money :-)

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Adrian Taylor E-mail: ajt@soton.ac.uk
UNIX Systems Support and Development Phone : +44 (0)1703 595546
Southampton University Computing Services Mobile: +44 (0)411 522087
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