Dan Melomedman wrote:

> No, NFS has caused many, many problems, with numerous operating systems over
> the years. Just RPC security holes in Solaris alone would be enough to
> consider something else. It's a stupid design that just won't die because
> people didn't really care to provide a solution for _storage sharing_.
> Emphasis on storage sharing. It's a system that I would hate to deploy in a
> production with any OS, not just Linux - especially for HA type clusters.

It will not die because it's cheap and simple to implement.  People have
designed better solutions for storage sharing that have been around for many,
many years (DEC, SGI, IBM, Solaris, etc.).  We're talking about smtp servers,
here.  SMTP is designed to deal with network outages.  Email is inherently
insecure as well.

Your NFS server should be behind a firewall and only be accessible to your
servers if you're concerned about security.  With a virtual user qmail-ldap
environment, the servers do not allow any user logins making the whole situation
more secure.

Solutions that are much more secure and stable than NFS have existed a long
time, but they come at a much steeper price.  Sure, NFS has gone far beyond what
was intended, but it's still a viable solution.
--

Clint Bullock
Network Administrator
University of Georgia
Office of the Vice President for Research

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