Main difference among NFS and Samba Servers

Question

What are the main difference among NFS and Samba Servers?

Answer 1

The difference among Samba and NFS is primarily that Samba employ the SMB (aka Lanmanager) protocol that is considered "standard" for PCs (Windows & OS/2 both have built in support for it, a free client is also accessible for DOS), whereas NFS employ its own protocol (generally just called "NFS") that is not commonly obtainable for PCs (NFS clients do exist for operating systems other than UNIX/Linux, however usually they're neither free or simple to setup).

Samba's SMB protocol lets the server machine to handle authentication, thus it can decide what files the client has access to depend on the specific machine and user connecting. NFS by default trusts all of the client machines totally (it's actually not intended to share files to unsecured workstations) and lets the client machines handle authentication all on their own (once an NFS server has been told to admit connections from a client machine the client does not needs any further server-side authentication, and can do anything it desire with the file system NFS gives it access to).

SMB does not (directly) support UNIX style file permissions, therefore it is perhaps a bad idea to routinely employ it to map file systems among machines which expect this information to be present and mutable, NFS certainly supports all standard UNIX file information (it also means that SMB is well for accessing a UNIX file system from a Windows machine, however not so hot the other way around).

Network File System (also known as NFS) is a protocol developed through Sun Microsystems. It lets a user on a computer to access files that are sent across a network –same to the way one accesses local storage. This is most common in systems along with a similar composition to the UNIX system

Samba is a re-implementation of SMB/CIFS networking protocol (meaning re-imaging of Server Message Block – or Common Internet File System). As along with the NFS, Samba runs most of course on a system along with qualities not unlike those of the UNIX systems. It comes standard along with approximately every distribution of Linux, and is utilized as a fundamental system service on all other UNIX-based systems .a. NFS is a protocol that let a user to access files over a network; In essence samba is a re-imaging of the Common Internet File System.

b. NFS has four versions, the newest of which comprise a stateful protocol; Samba contain multiple versions, the latest of which let file and print sharing among multiple computers.