Hi everyone !

Right now I can’t decide wich one is the most versatile and fit my personal needs, so I’m looking into your personal experience with each one of them, if you mind sharing your experience.

It’s mostly for secure shared volumes containing ebooks and media storage/files on my home network. Adding some security into the mix even tough I actually don’t need it (mostly for learning process).

More precisely how difficult is the NFS configuration with kerberos? Is it actually useful? Never used kerberos and have no idea how it works, so it’s a very much new tech on my side.

I would really apreciate some indepth personal experience and why you would considere one over another !

Thank you !

  • lemmyreaderEnglish
    7•7 months ago

    • NFS : historically insecure by default. Don’t know about Kerberos making it secure but Kerberos does not look easy to configure.

    • sshfs : probably most easy to setup. Can be confusing with ownership and permissions sometimes.

    • Samba : solid but has a learning curve, even for a simple setup. For example, for a standalone Samba server omitting the Active Directory part, you need to know that in order to create a Samba user you must first have created a local user with the same username.

    https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Setting_up_Samba_as_a_Standalone_Server

    • @TCB13English
      7•7 months ago

      sshfs : probably most easy to setup. Can be confusing with ownership and permissions sometimes.

      And the worst option if you have Windows clients.

      • @[email protected]
        2•7 months ago

        I am wondering if someone can recommend any libre sshfs client for windows7+ preferably that could be installed as a portable app ?

        • @TCB13
          2•7 months ago

          SSHFS is a client not a server. If you want to access SFTP / SSH “shares” from Windows WinSCP and Cyberduck are good options.

    • @[email protected]OP
      2•7 months ago

      Thanks for the link :) I have already setup a samba share (actually I have setup all 3 on my server xD). But Didn’t knew they have a whole tutorial on it :) Thanks for the resource, I think I will stay with samba :) Looks the most versatil and has also “easier” security function setup. I mean I don’t think I need Kerberos in my homelab setup and SSHFS… Yeah people tend to argue it’s a pain in the ass with Windows !

      • lemmyreaderEnglish
        3•7 months ago

        Thanks for the link :) I have already setup a samba share (actually I have setup all 3 on my server xD).

        Nice :) With Samba you can also create guest entries without passwords for visitors while having your private files behind your own login. Here an example of guest access : https://std.rocks/gnulinux_samba_no_password.html

        And apart from that Samba should be fine for access from MacOS and Windows clients unlike with the ancient NFS, which I expect to be more troublesome to connect especially on Windows, though that is a wild guess.