Chapter 15. Network Filesystems
In many environments, we want to share files and programs among many
workstations in a local area network. Doing so requires programs that
let us share the files, create new files, do file locking, and manage
ownership correctly. Over the last dozen years there have been a
number of network-capable filesystems developed by commercial firms
and research groups. These have included Apollo Domain, the Andrew
Filesystem (AFS), Coda, the AT&T Remote Filesystem (RFS), and Sun
Microsystems' Network Filesystem (NFS). Each of
these has had beneficial features and drawbacks.
In this chapter, we limit ourselves to covering what have become the
two network
filesystems most commonly seen on Unix
servers:
- Network Filesystem (NFS)
-
Sun's NFS is the
most widely used Unix network filesystem. NFS is available on almost
all versions of Unix, as well as on Apple Macintosh systems, MS-DOS,
Windows, OS/2, and OpenVMS.
- Server Message Block (SMB)
-
The SMB protocol
(sometimes also called CIFS: the Common Internet File System) is the
network filesystem native to Microsoft Windows. But thanks to the
free Unix-based SMB implementation Samba, Unix hosts are becoming
common participants in SMB networks as both clients and
servers. SMB compatibility is also available
natively in Mac OS 10.2 and in previous versions of Mac OS via
third-party software.
Because these two filesystems are the most common—and because
they are quite different in their security models—we focus in
this chapter on both of them. If you use one of the other forms of
network filesystems, there are associated security considerations,
many of which are similar to the ones we present here. Be sure to
consult your vendor documentation.
|