FreeBSD NFS Client, Windows 2003 NFS server

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <20061207090026.I17220 at knop-beagle.kn.op.dlr.de>
            Harti Brandt <hartmut.brandt at dlr.de> writes:
: MWL>Does anybody have experience with using FreeBSD 4.x or 6.x NFS clients
: MWL>against a Windows 2003 NFS server?  What is the performance relative
: MWL>to using a FreeBSD NFS server?  What is the stability?  Does locking
: MWL>work?  Does the Windows 2003 server have extensions that grok file
: MWL>system flags?
: 
: I use this regularily (well, -CURRENT). I have no numbers, but performance 
: is ok. I have the home directories on a W2003k server and it 'feels' fast 
: enough.

We see FreeBSD to FreeBSD NFS feeling fast enough for most things, but
when we do a full build of our system from scratch it takes 10 hours
over NFS vs 1 hour on a local disk.  We're worried that if we were to
try to do heavy NFS traffic to a Win2003 server with SFU this would be
even slower.

: The only problem I see is a lot of 'file server not reponding' and 'file 
: server up again' (with 2-3 seconds in between). This is usually when 
: saving a large mail from pine. Linux clients see the same problem, so I 
: suppose it is a problem on the SFU side.

So building large binaries might be a problem?

: Locking seems to work.

Does "seems to work" mean it really does work, or does SFU just do the
old trick of saying 'ok, your lock worked'?

: Problems 
: are with filenames that are illegal for NTFS - hosting a 2.11BSD source 
: tree on a W2003 NFS share does not work because of filenames containing 
: ':' :-). I've not tested what other characters are illegal.

That would be a problem for hosting a ports tree on the NTFS nfs
partition, no?

: Another problem is that on the NTFS side there is no good way to backup, 
: copy, whatever the trees, because while NTFS handles Makefile and 
: makefile, no Windows tool can access both of them. Even worse thinks like 
: ADSM backup sometimes die with internal errors.

That's ugly.

: Mapping of UIDs and GIDs is rather magic. The FreeBSD side, the SFU tools 
: and cygwin all see different numbers which is rather annoying. The same is 
: with symbolic links.

Symblic links point elsewhere?  or have different destinations?  Does
it matter absolute or relative?

: The file flags are not supported by the server. There are no extensions 
: that I know of.

Same problem with FreeBSD to FreeBSD NFS.

Warner