Re: [gentoo-user] Re: sanba mount on host machine

[James Ausmus]

On 11/6/06, reader@×××××××.com <reader@×××××××.com> wrote:
> Hans-Werner Hilse <hilse@×××.de> writes:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Sun, 05 Nov 2006 13:47:12 -0600 reader@×××××××.com wrote:
> >
> >> Is this possible withou really negative impact of some sort.
>
> > If this is a question (please clarify a bit, and use question marks
> > when appropriate!):  Of course it has a negative impact -- opposed to
> > built-in storage, which should be faster than network based storage :-)
>
> I guess it was phrased awkwardly, but did you not see the rest of the
> post? <==
>
>  (Posted here again for clarity)
>
>    Install as many HDD as mobo allows maybe adding a few more with pci
>    controllsers. (all sata if possible)
>
>    Install Gentoo as host OS on a smallish partition or drive.  Mount
>    all remaining drives as CIFS mounts accessable from samba or smb
>    from host or windowsXP clients.  All this over gigabit ethernet.
>
> > But if you have Windows clients, that's almost the only option you
> > have. Well, you could go with WebDAV, but I wouldn't recommend that,
> > it's most probably not nearly as stable as Samba.
>
> > Even for Linux/Unix clients (given they have proper CIFS/SMB support)
> > Samba is a capable option for a networked file system.
>
> Rephrasing the question:  Will it work to mount a hosts (gentoo host)
> native onboard drives as cifs mounts only.  These drives would all be
> formatted NTFS

In short - no.

Samba/CIFS are *network* filesystems - you can't "format a partition
with a Samba or CIFS filesystem", and you can't mount a local drive as
Samba or CIFS - it is not a physical filesystem, but a protocol to
access a share *over a network*.

All you need to do is format these drives with the filesystem of your
choice (I personally like ReiserFS, I've heard some people say that
XFS is better/faster for really big files, or, if you don't want/need
journaling, maybe just ext2?), then setup Samba to share those drives
over the network to the other computers that need to access them. The
magic of Samba/CIFS is that the other computer have absolutely *No
Clue* what the *underlying* filesystem on the physical drive is - they
don't care, and they don't need to care, as the Samba server on the
Gentoo side takes care of all of that. The filesystem on the client
side (the Windows box - NTFS) won't make any difference whatsoever
when transferring files to the Samba share, as Samba is Samba is Samba
- no matter the underlying physical filesystem that the Samba share is
"from".

HTH-

James


>
> (unless someone can tell me there is a linux format that
> will be as fast when dealing with huge video files.  And will not
> introduce some problem when trnaferring between NTFS on a client and
> whatever format on the gentoo box)
>
> I don't want to dink around with mounting as NTFS because of poor or
> non existent or illegal linux support for NTFS.
>
> The gentoo host would have its own partition or drive and would serve
> as a NAS for the other NTFS drives.
>
> So once again the question is can gentoo have its native drives (not
> the OS drive) formatted as NTFS and mounted only as cifs mounts on the
> same machine?
>
> > OTOH, there's Windows SFU, which you can use to mount NFS shares, but I
> > heard it's a pain in the *** to set it up.
>
> You heard right.  I've done it but it took a while and far as I know
> there is some inherent bottleneck with NFS moving huge files anyway.
> (That is hearsay since I did not try it when I had that setup.  I
> didn't have the need to move huge files then)
>
> --
> gentoo-user@g.o mailing list
>
>
-- 
gentoo-user@g.o mailing list