“The ability to share disks, directories, and files over a network is one of the most significant advances in modern computing, reducing local disk space requirements and making it easy for users to collaborate without ending up with hundreds of versions of the same files. Personal computers running Microsoft Windows and Apple’s MacOS and Mac OS X inherently support sharing disks and directories with other systems of the same types. Linux and Unix systems traditionally use the NFS network filesystem in order to do the same sort of thing.” Read the article at LinuxPlanet.
An Introduction of Modern Linux Distributed Filesystems
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I’m going to be moving in September, and setting up an openbsd (firewall/router), linux (file-server), and windows (games) network. Right now I have a similar network which uses NFSv3 and Samba for network file systems.
But WinXP/Samba performance is horrible. For some reason it takes a full minute for XP to ask me for my password when connecting to a Samba server, and XP seems to disconnect from Samba servers every few hours, so when you click on the drive it takes a bunch more seconds to reconnect.
It seems that Windows supports OpenAFS. Does anyone have experience using this (or other distributed filesystems) on their networks? I would use it exclusively if it has good performance in both UNIX and Windows.
just get an NFS server for windows
But are there any free NFS clients for windows? I have some NFS client on a Solaris 2.6 CD which is about 6 years old… I’m not sure that would work too well under WinXP.
Hi Jim,
If you can set up BSD & NFS, then this is probably too simple, but it sounds like a DNS problem. Are your sure that your IP Addresses are getting allocated properly? and have you run all the command line test programs?
I have had the same symptoms caused by my making silly mistakes with the hosts table, amongst other things.
For any fellow novices, Teach Yourself Samba In 24 Hours is a surprisingly good read.
We have a DNS server running on the router, and as far as I know everything is working properly. All machines get very fast lookup and ping times for other hosts on the network.
I think the problem is actually related to samba encrypted passwords… For backward compatability, we disable encryption on samba passwords, and on win98 and above boxes. This is not a problem on Win2K and below, but on WinXP it makes logons incredibly slow (at least that’s the best explanation I’ve gotten from various mailing lists).
In my new apartment I won’t have to deal with the roommates running Win95, so I guess I can try out Samba w/encrypted passwords.