Well, the honeymoon is over. Samba is great and all, but it’s not gonna work with my simple little network setup. The main reason is just that it’s too painful to configure just right. I’ll take “slightly crippling transfer rates when using Konqueror” versus “ignores my settings” any day.
The problems I’m having with Samba are mostly nitpicks, but who cares … it’s my network and I can do whatever I want. I’m sure most of them could be solved by a little research, but at this point, if I don’t need it, I really don’t wanna invest too much time into it right now. I just want things to work, I can always screw around later.
Three things that are annoying me: First, I can’t get CIFS to work, but SMBFS works fine. Naturally, that’s not a killer deal, but I just gotta have the faster, shinier and better protocol or it’ll haunt me forever. The second is that getting just plain anonymous share mounting isn’t working. I can do it if I put the username and password options in the fstab file, or point to a credentials file, but it’s still easier if I want to do it manually, I don’t have to add all the options. The third thing is that Samba is ignoring my preferences for forcing the username to write to and the permissions to use. Ugh.
All slightly annoying, but I never had the issues with NFS. In fact, the crippling copy speeds were about it, and even that I could probably figure out if I tried. I’d rather take one issue than three. Besides, I really should roll up my sleeves and give NFSv4 a try. Maybe it’ll be less flaky for me. Who knows.
install net-fs/mount-cifs
mount -t cifs //deathstar/D$ /smb/deathstar/d_drive –verbose -o user=xxx,pass=xxx
When you decide NFS is really teh sux0rs and you want to figure out how to get samba to do what you want, I’ll help you.