DSM-G600, DNS-3xx and NSA-220 Hack Forum

Got to be careful with these statements - SAMBA isn't mandatory for anything other than unix/linux in a Windows environment or vice-versa - and even then, I'm not sure that it is mandatory or just the "road most travelled".

Microsoft's operating systems use SMB/CIFS - Server Message Block/Common Internet File System - to share files and printers.  Because of Microsoft's dominance of the PC market, just about everything else has learned to "talk" SMB/CIFS, making it the "lingua franca" of the file sharing world, in pretty much the same fashion as tcp/ip has become the lingua franca of network protocols.

SAMBA - is an open source implementation of SMB/CIFS - and as such can be found in pretty much every unix or linux OS distribution or variant available - it is however, not mandatory between OS's of different types, nor does it apply to all OS's - just the unix/linux ones.

In the early '90's I did a number of "cross platform" implementations without SAMBA (or tcp/ip for that matter)

Last edited by fordem (2007-07-17 15:42:39)

dkl wrote:

fordem: which way, except SAMBA, can you basically share the DNS323 files with Windows based PCs?

Vista (Enterprise and Ultimate editions) comes with an NFS client.

dkl wrote:

fordem: which way, except SAMBA, can you basically share the DNS323 files with Windows based PCs?

I guess I really don't need to answer this question seeing as fonz did it, but if you had read through my post before responding (I notice you did do it after) you'd've understood where I was coming from, and I did say ...

SAMBA isn't mandatory for anything other than unix/linux in a Windows environment or vice-versa - and even then, I'm not sure that it is mandatory or just the "road most travelled".

... which actually covers the question you asked.

Your statement was way too broad - SAMBA is Windows & unix/linux and their derivatives, you haven't started touching the other OSs - what about Novell before Netware 5, when Novell switched to ip?  What about IBM's OS/400 and those are just a few of the OSs that don't use SAMBA to talk to Windows clients.

Let me ask you this - let's take John Q Public, walks in to BestBuy or wherever.  He's looking for something to store his music collection and the salesman points him to the DNS-323 and a couple of disks.  He takes it home, reads the manual and installs it, it works, he turns on the itunes server, gets his music and he's happy.  His wife and kids have somewhere to store their pictures and they're happy.  They're all running Windows XP or Vista, doesn't matter.

Are they using SAMBA?  Do they know? Do they care?

My point is, to the target market, the DNS -323 is an appliance - most of the users (me included) don't really care what OS it runs on, as long it works.  We don't know that the DNS-323 runs linux and SAMBA and we don't care.  We will tell you that we're not running SAMBA because it's not installed on our PCs, and to use the DNS-323 is a little "black box"

Don't get me wrong I do enjoy fiddling with the linux aspects of the box, but that's primarily as a learning experience - believe it or not, it actually meets all my needs running the basic firmware, and I've also experienced very few of the problems that the other forum members have had - the 2 GB limit from W2K3 has been the only one.

Incidentally - if my memory is correct, I actually used an NFS client with Windows 3.1, it's just too far back for me to remember clearly.

fordem wrote:

My point is, to the target market, the DNS -323 is an appliance - most of the users (me included) don't really care what OS it runs on, as long it works.  We don't know that the DNS-323 runs linux and SAMBA and we don't care.  We will tell you that we're not running SAMBA because it's not installed on our PCs, and to use the DNS-323 is a little "black box"

I understand your point, and I'm happy to know you don't care what OS runs on the DNS 323 (although I don't believe you when you say this), but I don't think this is related to the question from Emacs...

If you read the first post (I'm sure you did...), the question is "what are the pro's and cons between NFS and Samba?" Do you think this question applies to somebody who "does not care what OS runs on theDNS323?" I think that if Emacs asks this question, this is because is does *not* want to consider the DNS323 as a blackbox. Anyway, he can't,  because NFS is not supported natively by the DNS323, so he must go through fun_plug to install it, etc...
 
He wants to know the advantage of using NFS from his clients MS Windows and Ubuntu, I don't think he mentionned Novell, Windows 3.11 or even VAX VMS.

My answer was: "you should *logically* use NFS from your Ubuntu PC". Which, I think, was a valuable answer...
Fonz added, that, from a Vista client, he can also use NFS, which is also a valuable answer...