I’ve finally pulled the trigger on a gigabit ethernet/wifi-n router, and will probably spend some time this weekend getting my network reconfigured.
Now’s as good a time as any to make sure that SMB/Samba is still the best solution for me to share folders across a <10 device network that includes Windows PCs*, a Macbook, an Ubuntu PC, and a USB printer I hope to be able to connect directly off the router.
I’ve been using SMB/Samba for a while, sometimes with WINS sometimes without, and I haven’t really given my network much thought in a while, so I figured why not check to make sure I haven’t missed anything.
- 3 running XP SP3, 1 running Vista, 1 dual-booting DOSWin3.1/Win98SE. That last one doesn’t see much up-and-running time.
Possibly… But if the right file systems are chosen then each can be used by the alternate OSs.
Linux can read/write to the Fats and to NTFS anyway: I have one external drive on NTFS solely ( since it is a pretty aged FS ) to share stuff on Windows machines. The only caveat being that Windows, other than it’s purposeful lack of coordination with any other system, can’t accept some characters and lengths in file names that Linux permits. This is rarely a problem and can be fixed by changing the names.
Windows can see Linux Ext file systems with things like EXT2fsd; maybe there’s something newer for the modern file systems such as BTRFS.
[ So far I just converted only storage drives to BTRFS. ]
As I have no knowledge with Macs, here is a useful if old — 2010 — article on doing this with all three.
SMB is the only dependable way for the macs on my network to see the windows boxes.
Filesystem isn’t relevant (well as long as it handles large enough files, long enough filenames and detailed enough hierarchical access list security … ) ,
The filesystem doesn’t link to the network protocol in use…
The OP is asking about network protocols.
He was asking could linux with samba be surpassed ?
No , it is the most efficient, and most flexible…
You can always get a DNLA server for linux,
that is, use SAMBA for read/write access to the files, and all the things that you do with SAMBA…
But then you use something like serviio to share your video files to your DNLA or UPNP capable smart TV or media player… so that you get proper, eg searchable, indexes for the video files (its like having a Netflix server at your home.)… Anyway DNLA is an efficient protocol for video file sharing to the smart TV system
Yes, SMB is the best option - all the systems involved ship with servers and clients. NFS and SFTP are options for Linux and OS X, but Windows doesn’t have native clients or servers.