[GTALUG] The current state of NFS

[Alex Volkov]

Hi Giles,

My experience with NFS has been entirely different, for me it was a 
simple fast system, that's faster than SAMBA and SSH, that let me copy 
files over a network where the speed limitation would be either hard 
drive throughput or a network card speed (if it were 100Mbps link). From 
the replies above it looks like NFSv4 is a completely different beast 
and it in your scenario it wouldn't really make sense to use it over 
SSH, so I'm going to discuss trade-offs of  NFSv3 vs SSH.

The limitations of Raspberry Pi is that it's got only 100Mbps Ethernet 
port and that it's doesn't have a lot of hardware for encryption 
compared to x86 CPU, you would be limited to about 2-3MBps transfer rate 
over SSH and you might be able to achieve about 10-12MBps transfer rate 
over NFS. This is all depends on how big the backup files are -- if they 
are about 20MB each than there's no point in setting up NFS, if they are 
about 1GB each, than what you can do is to encrypt the files using GPG 
on the server where they are being backed up and then transfer them to 
an unsecured NFS share on Raspberry Pi when they then would be further 
processed and moved off the share.

I'm assuming for Raspberry Pi you would use an external USB hard drive 
for storage, you could also increase networks speed to about 400Mbps if 
you use USB2 to Ethernet Gigabit network adapter, which could be bought 
for about $20-$40.

Alex.

On 02/22/18 15:25, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
> I used to use NFS back in 2000 - back when we still thought unsecured 
> local services were okay.  And I loved it - it was slow, but very 
> useful.  So I'd like to start using it again, but I want it secured.  
> Apparently NFSv4 "mandates strong security" (according to Wikipedia): 
> does that mean for authentication, or encryption of files "in flight," 
> or both? And I keep seeing it mentioned with Kerberos: I've been 
> researching Kerberos a bit and that really looks like something I'd 
> rather NOT have to set up.  Is it possible to run NFSv4 without 
> Kerberos?  Pointers to recent, good tutorials would also be deeply 
> appreciated.
>
> I'm using Fedora 27 and Debian (stable or testing) on the clients.  
> You can stomp me if you like for my plan to use a Raspberry Pi as the 
> server - I'm not looking for speed as this will mostly be for 
> backups.  I'd probably use Raspbian unless there's a compelling reason 
> to use one of the other Pi distros. Of course if this will really need 
> more memory than the Pi has, that's another issue ...
>
> -- 
> Giles
> https://www.gilesorr.com/
> gilesorr at gmail.com <mailto:gilesorr at gmail.com>
>
>
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