when it comes to folder sharing in a local network and Linux, you have basically the choice between samba and NFS. While samba is the better choice when you have also windows machines on the network, NFS should be the choice when the network is homogeneously Linux, since it is much easier to configure and directly maps user-ids and permissions on the remote machine.
One might think, that that native Linux filesystem should have good GUI tool coverage, but amazingly there are absolutely no tools for setting up NFS in Gnome, while accessing a Samba share is just a few clicks away. In order to set up NFS one still has to manually edit the fstab and manually mount the directory in the console. Neither Nautilus nor gnome-volume-manager give you a hand here.
Even though the tools you need are already there; you can already advertise NFS through Avahi/ Zeroconf and make it automatically show up on OSX – all it takes is to make Nautilus recognise this and automount the share in the /media/ folder.
So lets vote here and hope that the situation improves.
Yes and no. Samba often has better performance than NFS. And with the CIFS Unix extensions that SAMBA has supported for ages, it can easily map user-ids and permissions. Use a CIFS mount rather than a SMBFS mount, if you want to play with this stuff.
But yes, NFS support in GNOME-VFS would be nice, although I suspect it won’t be trivial.
NFS is barely usable over WLAN. I had to setup Mediatomb in order to get normal througput to my file server and media files via WLAN, since HTTP beats the s**** out of NFS, performancewise.
So NFS usage is basically limited to 100 MBit LANs and up. For a home network, it sucks, IMHO.
I have a 100% Linux network at my house and use ssh for my sharing. It is easy to use and easy very secure. I simply type ssh://computer-name/ and I have the access I need. I also have port-forwarding open on my router so that I can even SSH to all my machines from anywhere on the Internet as long as my primary PC is on.
ssh is nice if you need access your data quickly, but since it encrypts everything it transfers it is quite slow. (a lot slower than NFS)
ssh very practical, smb no way!, nfs is easy to setup and Im using it with Gnome Disk Mounter applet, it works ok, but I just don’t like the taskbar full of icons 🙂
NFS is definitely the way to go for Linux/UNIX sharing. I prefer to set things up via the automounter, amd. For Debian, it’s in the am-utils package. amd configuration can get really complex and nasty, but for a home network, just leave everything at the defaults and make sure the /net/machine_name/ mapping is enabled. Then all you need to do is edit /etc/exports on each machine, just as with any NFS setup. Now you can access /net/foo-server/home/user/… and access everything. And, after a timeout period, if nothing is using the NFS mount it will be unmounted. The automounter is handy because you can bring machines on the network up/down without much worry over what your static NFS mounts will do.
The only downside I’ve encountered is that amd can sometimes become… confused, I suppose… when you shut a machine down. It will wait for a remote server to respond if it thinks something is still mounted and it has timeout that is too long. But, it’s a minor annoyance and only sometimes happens during shutdown. Other than that it’s great. I’ve been using amd for a long time. Also, for a home network, it’s easy to make your uids/gids match on all the machines which makes R/W NFS mounts a simple matter.