Alternatives to nfs that rely on username/password or public key authenthication

Question

I'm looking for an alternative to nfs because i don't like:

• how nfs deals with different uid on host and client
• dynamic ip adresses in combination with nfs
• dificullty of setup

I know that these are all issues that can be solved, but i'm kind of looking for something that has the ease of use of sshfs, with the performance, and robustness of nfs (in case of multiple users at the same time for example).

I would like something where i could add users by just adding credentials to a file, instead of having to worry about ip adresses and uid's.

Solution

If it's the performance of NFS you want without a more "tricky" setup then your only other real option is CIFS/SMB (e.g. by mounting a Samba share). In terms of difficulty I'd say Samba setup isn't really easier than NFS but can be made to use kerberos...

Beyond that for performance you'll have to go to one of the parallel filesystems (e.g. Gluster, Ceph) but those are really meant for more distributed setups and won't necessarily be easy to get going. Perhaps going for a pre-made file server will be easier?

TLDR; nothing is as easy as SSHFS. For basic setups NFS is difficult to beat in terms of performance while being a full POSIX filesystem.

Comments

[Alessio]

does it need to behave like a POSIX filesystem on the client? if not, then Samba might do.

[Frederik Baetens]

That would be preferred, both host and client are linux machines, so it would be nice if that were possible.

[Andrew Henle]

how nfs deals with different uid on host and client That's true for any shared filesystem. dynamic ip adresses in combination with nfs You're not trying to map UIDs by IP address? Sounds like you need to get a handle on your user identification across your network first. dificullty of setup You're trying to set up shared filesystems and find NFS difficult? Everything else is even harder. If you need shared filesystems, you have to first solve the identification of users on your network. Or you can just let users SCP their files around, in which case you need to buy extra storage.

[Frederik Baetens]

Well, i agree on that setup isn't all that hard, and wouldn't really mind something that is harder to setup, but i find it weird that i have to edit my /etc/exports file with ip adresses instead of credentials for example (like with ssh). It's also annoying if some devices that require access to the server have a dynamic ip.

[Outurnate]

@smurfendrek123 if you don't want to whitelist client IPs, add an * client entry

[Frederik Baetens]

Well, that's helpful, but my biggest problem is the uid troubles when you have a client with more, and different users than the host.

[rajaganesh87]

whats wrong with SSHFS?