Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Andrew Beattie wrote: > Microsoft consider telnet to be part of sfu, so when your 90 days > are up you loose [the rather sucky] MS telnet. If it matters to you to have telnet logins to a Windows box, you can also get it via IIS. I don't rememeber the details of how it's set up, but I have played around with it and it worked tolerably well. Granted, the fact that IIS supports Telnet may be misconstrued as a bug, not a feature... -- Chris Devers
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Andrew Beattie wrote: > Microsoft consider telnet to be part of sfu, so when your 90 days > are up you loose [the rather sucky] MS telnet. If it matters to you to have telnet logins to a Windows box, you can also get it via IIS. I don't rememeber the details of how it's set up, but I have played around with it and it worked tolerably well. Granted, the fact that IIS supports Telnet may be misconstrued as a bug, not a feature... -- Chris Devers
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tuesday, July 1, 2003, at 05:38 AM, Dave Cross wrote: 1/ How much chance is there that a Samba installation will cause problems? How stable is Samba? i've been using samba at my job for four years. i started using it to share a single filesystem to unix, windows, and mac clients (also had nfs and appletalk on the same box[1]). the IT people never figured out that it wasn't a windows machine, and windows users never knew any different. when the company started getting hit by nimda, the samba logs helped me track down fifty to a hundred infected machines (set the log level up to 3 and then grep the logs every hour for ntoskrnl.exe, and whoever made that request was infected -- 100% success rate on that one). turns out, other IT peeps at my company were using samba on solaris and samba on AIX to provide what nearly everyone thought were huge NT servers... but actually, the unix machines were on a large tape backup network... when i worked at my university, we used samba to serve the students' web directories to them via authenticated samba from a big solaris box. samba is the strong, silent type. it always works, it's always good, people are always fixing it... but it gets none of the hype surrounding apache and linux. of course, all this anectodal evidence doesn't help you secure a contract. instead, secure a *person* who knows samba (or is willing to learn) and dedicate that person to support of that server. do it clandestinely, experiment, get a feel for how well it performs. deploy more servers in secret. *then* ask your services guys to support samba; when they balk and claim it's not production strength, you can surprise them -- "you've been soaking in it, and we haven't had any problems!" 2/ Is there anyone that will provide a commercial support contract for Samba? dunno, i've never needed it. 3/ Are there any other solutions we can look at - like, perhaps, an NFS client for Windows? you will be uniformly disappointed. somebody already mentioned hummingbird --- i can't say i was impressed. other options, like sftp, are nowhere near as simple and no-thought-required to use. you may wish to check whether somebody's commercial offering is really just some decorations surrounding samba. [1] the actual task was to integrate a mac into a hard-core windows shop (former ibm peoples). i was told by some IT people that macs can't be networked (i am not making this up). others told me that the only solution was something called "dave", which either served appletalk from NT or smb from mac os9, i can't remember which, but was very expensive. the linux machine was far and away the best solution, and nobody knew any different until IT people called me up to make sure i had antivirus software up to date on my server.
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tuesday, July 1, 2003, at 05:46 AM, Alex Hudson wrote: You would have to be an a-class muppet though. /me pouts now i see how you really feel about me. i'm going to take my ball and go home.
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
Microsoft themselves do http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/ which has an NFS client. Its about as supported as all the other Windows products :) You can even ask for a 90day eval disk with training material on it. Microsoft consider telnet to be part of sfu, so when your 90 days are up you loose [the rather sucky] MS telnet. Andrew
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Dave Cross wrote: > 1/ How much chance is there that a Samba installation will cause > problems? How stable is Samba? Plenty of people here have more informed opinions than me, I'll leave them to fight it out > 2/ Is there anyone that will provide a commercial support contract > for Samba? You want to give someone moeny for a service ? Of course someone will take your money, no idea who is reliable though. > 3/ Are there any other solutions we can look at - like, perhaps, > an NFS client for Windows? NFS on windows has a bit of a chequered history of reliability, however I'll stick in a good word for OmniNFS and the other NFS stuff from xlink(.com) - the only on-going reliable nfs server I've ever encounted for windows (and I've tried several) and they do client and server, but also full gateway products so you might want to install the on one server, and then let that proxy between nfs and samba. the hatter
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 12:09:56PM +0200, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: > Robin Berjon wrote: > > Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: > > > Alternatives : > > > WebDAV ? IIRC Windows' file explorer supports it natively. > > > > It does. I'm not sure however that using WebDAV as a full time file system is a > > happy choice, not sure it's been tested that intensively. It'll also be slow. > > So WebDAV, like Samba, doesn't require any additionnal software on the > recent clients. Good point for it. That depends on the quality of the client which comes pre-installed. > The relative performances depends on the use case. I believe that WebDAV > demands less bandwidth than Samba. That depends very sensitively on the combination of client and server, and how they interpret the semantics of the incomplete spec that is WebDAV. For example, under some circumstances, some versions of the M$ DAV client follow a DAV-enhanced PUT /foo with a GET /foo to verify that the PUT succeeded. This doubles the user-perceived time taken to complete a file upload. In general, I'm unhappy with a solution which has this sort of nasty mismatch of implementations possibility.[0] > I'm quite confident in the quality of mod_dav (for apache 2) due to my > experience with Subversion. But that's a personal impression. We don't > use WebDAV by itself at work -- just as a support layer for DeltaV, the > protocol extension used by Subversion over http. Subversion and DeltaV really aren't that happy a marriage, or weren't the last time I looked at them. The problem is that completely general version control systems are actually remarkably difficult to get right, due to the entirely different (and at times impossible to reconcile) usage modes that people want to use them in.[1] Subversion and DeltaV have different ideas about some fairly fundamental things, IIRC. > Now there's also the questions of access control, file ownership, rights > management, etc... which are (to my taste) easier to manage in Apache > than in Samba. YMMV. Ben [0] OK, OK. So I should really stop using SSL, then... [1] If anyone's tempted to follow up with "I don't see what's so difficult about general VC systems...", I'd advise them to go read the IETF DELTAV WG archives. See you in a while.
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 11:49:02AM +0200, Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: > Dave Cross wrote: > > So, a few questions: > > > > 3/ Are there any other solutions we can look at - like, perhaps, > > an NFS client for Windows? > > There are NFS clients for Windows. Alternatives : > WebDAV ? IIRC Windows' file explorer supports it natively. WebDAV, especially M$'s implementation of it, should *not* be used for this sort of file transfer. Especially not for large files. filesystem-over-HTTP is not necessarily as good an idea as it might first appear. As others have noted, Samba really is the solution here. Ben
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
Robin Berjon wrote: > Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: > > Alternatives : > > WebDAV ? IIRC Windows' file explorer supports it natively. > > It does. I'm not sure however that using WebDAV as a full time file system is a > happy choice, not sure it's been tested that intensively. It'll also be slow. So WebDAV, like Samba, doesn't require any additionnal software on the recent clients. Good point for it. The relative performances depends on the use case. I believe that WebDAV demands less bandwidth than Samba. I'm quite confident in the quality of mod_dav (for apache 2) due to my experience with Subversion. But that's a personal impression. We don't use WebDAV by itself at work -- just as a support layer for DeltaV, the protocol extension used by Subversion over http. Now there's also the questions of access control, file ownership, rights management, etc... which are (to my taste) easier to manage in Apache than in Samba. Former administrator of both speaking.
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
Rafael Garcia-Suarez wrote: Alternatives : WebDAV ? IIRC Windows' file explorer supports it natively. It does. I'm not sure however that using WebDAV as a full time file system is a happy choice, not sure it's been tested that intensively. It'll also be slow. -- Robin Berjon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Research Engineer, Expwayhttp://expway.fr/ 7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
Dave Cross wrote: So, a few questions: 1/ How much chance is there that a Samba installation will cause problems? How stable is Samba? I've used Samba for two years at my last company without a hitch. The company where I'm at now has been using it for 18 months, again not with the slightest trace of trouble. Note that OS X shipped with the Samba client from day one (IIRC) and with the Samba server since Jaguar. All the people I know that have used found it to be perfectly stable. -- Robin Berjon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Research Engineer, Expwayhttp://expway.fr/ 7FC0 6F5F D864 EFB8 08CE 8E74 58E6 D5DB 4889 2488
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
Dave Cross wrote: > So, a few questions: > > 1/ How much chance is there that a Samba installation will cause > problems? How stable is Samba? Samba is quite stable, but well, it has the same problems than NetBIOS : it's bandwidth consuming (designed for LANs). And if the machines are open on the Outside, you must be very careful about security, access control and software updates. > 2/ Is there anyone that will provide a commercial support contract > for Samba? > > 3/ Are there any other solutions we can look at - like, perhaps, > an NFS client for Windows? There are NFS clients for Windows. Alternatives : WebDAV ? IIRC Windows' file explorer supports it natively. rsync ? (over ssh ?) (hey, that's another fine piece of software A. Tridgell is reponsible for) It's difficult to give a advice without knowing the use case.
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Dave Cross wrote: > 1/ How much chance is there that a Samba installation will cause > problems? How stable is Samba? Very few although make sure you have a recent version if you're using Windows 2000 or XP anywhere. There were some issues that needed to be resolved when these OS's came out because they changed the way the authentication was done (iirc, maybe it was something else). Samba is rock solid in my experience. I've run whole companies' data storage needs with it. > 2/ Is there anyone that will provide a commercial support contract > for Samba? http://uk.samba.org/samba/support/uk.html - no idea if any of them are any good though. > 3/ Are there any other solutions we can look at - like, perhaps, > an NFS client for Windows? If you're a win 2k shop, you could always set up WebDAV on the server and create webfolders on the win2k boxen. Failing that http://www.google.com/search?q=nfs+client+windows returns lots of options. Simon. -- "If you've never seen an elephant ski then you've never been on acid!"
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On 1 Jul 2003 at 11:01, Dean Wilson wrote: > Microsoft themselves do http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/ > which has an NFS client. Its about as supported as all the other Windows > products :) > > You can even ask for a 90day eval disk with training material on it. I got one free with the most recent issue of _Sys Admin_ magazine. (Two CDs, though I think one's mostly training videos.) You're welcome to it as far as I'm concerned. Cheers, Philip -- Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
Roger Burton West wrote: > On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 02:38:07AM -0700, Dave Cross wrote: > I believe that some commercial SSH clients now give an "explorer-like" > interface to sftp, but I don't do commercial software so I can't > comment further. Some Commercial SSH do, i used the FSecure one at my last workplace[0]. Its just another explorer window that you type your password/phrase into and then drag and drop between it and your local desktop. It was quite popular as most of the developers were Dozer people. Dean [0] Evals from here: https://europe.f-secure.com/download-purchase/download-forms/sshclientwin.shtml -- Profanity is the one language all programmers understand --- Anon
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 02:38:07AM -0700, Dave Cross wrote: > 1/ How much chance is there that a Samba installation will cause > problems? How stable is Samba? It's possible - if you don't know how to set it up. You can destroy whole (network) neighborhoods with it ;) PDC wars, constant master re-elections, all kinds of havoc are possible. You would have to be an a-class muppet though. Samba has been around ages, is actively developed by a number of companies to provide the backbone of various NAS products, and even the forthcoming 3.0 (still in alpha, IIRC) is sufficiently stable that people are using it in production. > 2/ Is there anyone that will provide a commercial support contract > for Samba? Couldn't name companies ottomh, but they are definitely out there. > 3/ Are there any other solutions we can look at - like, perhaps, > an NFS client for Windows? Unix Services for Windows, but it's supposed to be a bit sucky. Samba is really the solution here though. Cheers, Alex.
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On 1 Jul 2003 at 2:38, Dave Cross wrote: > 3/ Are there any other solutions we can look at - like, perhaps, > an NFS client for Windows? There's http://www.hummingbird.com/products/nc/nfs/index.html , for example (Hummingbird Maestro). I have no experience with the product, though. Cheers, Philip -- Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
Dave Cross wrote: > A bit of general advice needed please people. > An anonymous client of mine has identified a need to access Unix > filesystems from Windows PCs. > 3/ Are there any other solutions we can look at - like, perhaps, > an NFS client for Windows? Microsoft themselves do http://www.microsoft.com/windows/sfu/ which has an NFS client. Its about as supported as all the other Windows products :) You can even ask for a 90day eval disk with training material on it. Dean -- Profanity is the one language all programmers understand --- Anon
Re: [ot] Mounting Unix Drives in Windows
On Tue, Jul 01, 2003 at 02:38:07AM -0700, Dave Cross wrote: >1/ How much chance is there that a Samba installation will cause >problems? How stable is Samba? As long as you set os level = 65 or lower, I have seen no problems with Samba that aren't inherent in the SMB protocol, and I've used it quite a bit. Rock solid. >3/ Are there any other solutions we can look at - like, perhaps, >an NFS client for Windows? Serious payware, but I'm sure the support company will be glad to sell it to you at only a slight markup. I believe that some commercial SSH clients now give an "explorer-like" interface to sftp, but I don't do commercial software so I can't comment further. R
