Serious alternatives to Samba?

electricitylikesme

Are there any serious alternatives to Samba, which implement roughly the same functionality?

I've been looking and I'm honestly not sure. It seems like NFS would work in conjunction with regular DNS to provide browsing capability.

Essentially what I'm asking I suppose is, for a kind of theoretical exercise, is is there a network file sharing protocol out there which doesn't chill the blood a bit when you hit enter on a password dialog? Something that implements SSH or the like (I know you can tunnel Samba over SSH but it's not particularly useful).

It just seems to me at the moment that no matter where you go, the end result is installing a Samba network regardless of operating system.

ToyD

openvpn with bridging enabled? Then you can use regular windows file sharing :-P

Zilla360

I haven't tried this, so no idea if it works or not.

Crossmeta project aims to share data between Linux and Windows systems at ease. With its native support for EXT2/EXT3, XFS and Reiserfs in Windows 2000, 2003 and XP access your valuable data from Linux partitions at very high-performance, local disk access speed.

System Requirements

* Windows 2000 SP3 and above
* Windows 2003 and XP Pro (32bit)
* Windows 2003 SP1 (32bit)New

Crossmeta kernel

The Crossmeta core kernel developed using Microsoft Installable File System (IFS) kit supports Network File System (NFS) client and server. Some of the main features of Crossmeta NFS include:

* Supports NFS version 2 and 3 over UDP
* Fully integrated with Cache manager for highest level of cache consistency
* Full UNIX style authentication uid/gid based and no password has to be keyed in.
* Supports NTFS, FAT and CDFS
* Add-on product available to support Linux XFS, EXT2 and Reiserfs
* All NFS client mounts are accessible via single drive letter V:
* Can work with 3rd party portmap service.

This Crossmeta kernel also includes FreeBSD UFS/FFS file system driver.

http://www.crossmeta.com/case_nfs.html
http://www.crossmeta.com/crossmeta.html

electricitylikesme

Oh snap - I'll definitely check that out.

I've gotten all interested in Samba alternatives since my home network recently diversified to a mix of Linux, Win XP and Mac OS systems, then realized I have no idea what I'd be running if I wasn't running Samba.