How common is NFS in the corporate work place?

[bgunn]

Hi All

I have always been curious about this question, because from my understanding it is not very common to encounter a lot of UNIX/Linux computers in the companies where I have previously worked. It usually seems to be the case that there will be a UNIX/Linux server, but most work stations are windows based. Based on this observation I have always wondered how widely NFS is used and why someone would choose to use it over SMB? Under what circumstances (I mean real world examples) would you choose NFS?

Regards, Ben

P.S. This is not meant to start a SMB vs NFS debate, but rather try to get a feel for which one is used more often and in under what circumstances.

[andysimmons]

Since Linux treats a NFS share like a regular partition, you don't need to install any client software to access it. Not going through a client to access information makes things easier in general, possibly at the expense of security. However, NFS can be a fairly secure solution if you tunnel it through an SSH connection. I think that's probably obvious enough, but if you still want a real-life example, then here you go. An off-site backup script would be easier to write if you're backing up to NFS, since you can treat the share like any other storage device in your computer.

[mdwatts]

I would say very common as we use NFS between all of our work AIX systems and I use NFS between my 3 personal Linux work pc's.

[SeT]

the company i currently work for has several unix/linux servers and a few hundred unix workstations for cad then linux and a handful of admin pc's. i think they use a combination of nfs and samba... not sure but i think the only thing they're using nfs for is as the first reply described tho.

[kshim5]

http://us2.samba.org/samba/docs/SambaIntro.html

http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/NFS-HOWTO/intro.html#WHAT

the major differences between SMB and NFS