On 02/05/06, Geert Hendrickx <ghen@telenet.be> wrote:
> On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 02:53:56PM +0100, Patrick Welche wrote:
> > If the aim is to serve files from a NetBSD server to M$ Windows clients=
,
> > is option 1) of
> >
> > 1) samba              "ordinary" cifs client
> > 2) apache/webdav      webfolder
> > 3) iscsi-target       iscsi-initiator
> > 4) others?
>
> iSCSI (3) is more like SAN, i.e., you don't serve files, but raw blocks.
> This implies that only one client can "mount" a given service at a time,
> i.e. you can't share files amongst multiple clients (unless they're
> mounting it read-only, but I'm not sure about that).

Microsoft iSCSI initiator has the multipath option (I haven't tried it
myself). If there is a Windows server in the network, iSCSI could be
quite cheap/fast to setup/decent performance. I have several quite old
NetBSD-current systems, running it. On one of the machines I hit some
kind of write performance problem - the write speed dropped
considerably (don't remeber the figures; I had them sent to en earlier
mail to one of the lists). Reading was always OK. The machine itself
is just a single P/Pro 200Mhz with 128MB memory, one SCSI disk for the
OS (-current as of 3.99.15); the network interface is Realtek @100mb/s
(which may explain the slow writing, together with the ATA disk which
contains the target...).

Anyway, the recommended iSCSI setup is on a separate network segment,
best gigabit. The advantage is that the setup of the NetBSD target is
quite simple - just basic networking and the iSCSI target itself. The
authentication / permissions / protection (or lack of...) is then at
the hands of the host running the initiator.

>
> I don't know (2) very well.  I guess it's more ftp-like than samba-like.

Same here.

>
> (1) is probably the best/easiest way to go for traditional file-sharing.

It is certainly different from the iSCSI; depends on one's purpose and
one's experience with Samba/Windows networking. It would be
interesting to do some benchmarking of the two setups using identical
hardware.


>
>         Geert
>

Chavdar