Setting up NFS shares

An alternative to Samba is Network File System (NFS). It's a great method of sharing files from a Linux or Unix server to a Linux or Unix server. As I mentioned earlier in the chapter, Windows systems can access NFS shares as well, but that requires an add-on to be enabled. Therefore, NFS is preferred in a Linux or Unix environment, since it fully supports Linux- and Unix-style permissions. As you can see from our dive into Samba earlier, we essentially forced all shares to be treated as being accessed by a particular user, which was messy, but was the easiest example of setting up a Samba server without also walking you through setting up a Windows Active Directory controller. Samba can certainly support per-user access restrictions and benefits greatly from a centralized directory server, though that would basically be a book of its own! NFS is a bit more involved to set up, but in the long run, I think it's easier and integrates better...