NFS alternatives?

[Giles Orr]

2009/11/10 Darryl Moore <darryl-90a536wCiRb3fQ9qLvQP4Q at public.gmane.org>:
> Tyler Aviss wrote:
>> On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 11:15 AM, Chris F.A. Johnson
>> Ditto on SSHFS, it tends to be a little more friendly and a lot more
>> secure than NFS, though I haven't tested it for massive deployment.
>
> I'm not sure it could work for a massive deployment. At least not for
> centrally mounted home directories the conventional way NFS does. sshfs
> mounted directories will only have the same access as the user that
> mounted them. There is no way this could work if /home is on another
> machine, and several users are using the client machine.

Another strong negative with SSHFS (at least the last time I tried it)
is that it's very sensitive to network outages.  NFS (in my
experience) can pick up after any length of network outage without
blinking, but SSHFS died permanently and inelegantly after its
built-in inactivity time-out (set in the SSH configs, usually ~15
minutes?), and the cause isn't immediately obvious.  Perhaps that
could be fixed by making the time-out infinite ...

> I thought NFSv4 was going to include options for network encryption, or
> require network login before making user files accessable, or something
> like that. Is machine to machine encryption for filesystem data a big
> deal in corporate deployments, when the machines are on the same local
> network?

All of that sounds marvelous.  Is it actually happening?  According to
this - http://nfs.sourceforge.net/ - 2.6.x kernels support nfsv4.  But
is  encryption implemented?  Is it automatic if both client and server
support v4?  Has anyone used this and/or seen it in action?  I used to
use NFS a lot, but its relative insecurity and clear-text transmission
put me off.  I have less use for it now, but I'm still very
interested.  Thanks.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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