nfs export a partition mounted via samba?

Chris Snook csnook at redhat.com
Wed Jan 23 17:37:41 UTC 2008


Dave Burns wrote:
> One of our users has a NAS or lan disk that he wants to make available
> (read only) to a number of people in our office. The disk's interface
> with the world is samba. Our shop uses NFS. How possible/suicidal
> would it be to try to mount this disk on a linux box via samba, then
> export it again via NFS? Would it work at all, be ridiculously slow,
> or bring Armageddon?

It should work if the export is read-only *everywhere*.  If someone has write 
access to the underlying share, and writes to it while NFS clients have it 
mounted indirectly, Bad Things will happen, since Samba and NFS know nothing 
about each other's locking mechanisms.  Performance may or may not be good, 
depending on how you're using it.

> I've googled around, but I haven't discovered the right search terms
> to separate people who are comparing the two from the loonies like me
> who want to piggyback them. Or maybe I am the only one nutty enough to
> have even considered this (as if each weren't flakey enough on their
> own).

Plenty of people have tried this, but very few carry it through to completion to 
write it up.  Most of them decide the inflexibility of the configuration is more 
of a pain than just setting up cifs (which is much better than the old smbfs) on 
the end clients.

	-- Chris




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