My two cents:

Bad idea.

From what I have seen of SFU, the performance is horrid, and the
only work around is to enable write caching at the server. This
speeds things up, but also violates the NFS V3 specification by
making COMMITS async, and not guaranteed to be completed
to stable storage. If you don't mind losing your data, it might work
for you :-(
Systems that I have measured with NFS V3 semantics being
properly handled indicate that on identical hardware, SFU's NFS
is roughly 8 times slower than the same hardware running a
Linux distro.
Sometimes there are things in the universe that do not exist, and
that too is an indication of something. Have you ever noticed that
the industry standard benchmark for NFS, SPEC SFS, has NO
results for systems running SFU ? There is probably a very good
reason for this :-)

Have fun,
Mangled & Munged


"C3" <gned@telsMONOPOLYtra.com> wrote in message
news:401b7e93$0$28866$afc38c87@news.optusnet.com.a u...
> I read recently that Microsoft has made its Services For Unix (SFU) free.
> Since I use a Linux server, I thought it may be worth switching my file
> sharing from Samba to NFS.
>
> Does anybody have any comments on this? I understand setting up the
Windows
> side of things will be more difficult than using SMB, but the Linux side
> will be a bit easier, won't it?
>
> My Windows machine also exports some directories so that my Linux server
can
> access them. I gather this will become easier by switching solely to an
NFS
> solution.
>
> cheers,
>
> C3
>
>