Ubuntu – SSH vs SMB vs NFS for GUI file transfer

12.04file-sharingnfssambassh

I am using Ubuntu 12.04 on many computers at my school (I am a teacher and the head tech dude). I use Clonezilla to massively clone desktops and laptops. I want to easily share the disk images between computers in order to back things up.

I tried sharing over our wireless network using samba, and I did get it to work, but it was painfully slow trying to transfer 3GB+. It was much faster over the wired network, but I still had connectivity issues. Correct me if I'm wrong but I understand that samba is based on a windows standard, and that SSH is more Linux-native. My experience with samba has not been favorable so far.

NFS seems to have more features than samba. I think this is what Mac OS uses by default.

So, my question is: what is the best GUI way to share files between two Ubuntu machines with the following priorities in descending order:

speed
free and open source
easy setup
compatible with Windows and Mac OS

Best Answer

You are right, SMB is something coming originally from Windows. But nowadays it works great with Linux and Mac as well.

Since speed is important, you have to keep in mind: SSH is a great thing for everything connected to Unix/Linux and networks, but it is really slow compared to NFS, FTP or SMB.

NFS is the fastest, but it is not encrypted. Do not use any unencrypted protocols if you can't fully trust your network (see also this Q&A). NFS should be available for Windows and Mac too, but it might be a bit of work to set it up.

SMB should be easy to set up on Windows, Linux and Mac and it is still reasonable fast compared to SSH. But the same warning about security holds for SMB (see this Q&A).

Some similar questions were discussed here.

There are also [many benchmarks] about the speed of different network protocols out there.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – Share the DVD drive with the Mac Mini over LAN

You could use sshfs to mount the directory on your Mac.

On the Ubuntu-Host you need to have the openssh-server installed:

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

On the Mac, install Fuse for OS X and MacFusion. Be sure to install the MacFUSE compatibility layer. MacFusion includes sshfs. The sshfs binary can be added to the PATH using a symlink:

sudo ln -s /Applications/Macfusion.app/Contents/PlugIns/sshfs.mfplugin/Contents/MacOS/sshfs /usr/local/bin/sshfs

Now, that you have openssh-server on your ubuntu host and MacFusion on the Mac, you can do the following (replace /media/mountdir by the actual mount location of the cd drive on the host) on the Mac:

mkdir /media/cdromdrive
sshfs Benutzername@ubuntuhost:/media/mountdir /media/cdromdrive

after that you should be able to access the contents on the cd from the directory (mount point) /media/cdromdrive

Ubuntu – How to share an optical drive in a way that fools the client into thinking it’s a local drive

I think you might be able to accomplish what you want using network block devices (NBD). Looking at the wikipedia page on the subject there is mention of a tool called nbd. It's comprised of a client and server component.

Example

In this scenario I'm setting up a CDROM on my Fedora 19 laptop (server) and I'm sharing it out to an Ubuntu 12.10 system (client).

installing

$ apt-cache search ^nbd-
nbd-client - Network Block Device protocol - client
nbd-server - Network Block Device protocol - server

$ sudo apt-get install nbd-server nbd-client

sharing a CD

Now back on the server (Fedodra 19) I do a similar thing using its package manager YUM. Once complete I pop a CD in and run this command to share it out as a block device:

$ sudo nbd-server 2000 /dev/sr0

** (process:29516): WARNING **: Specifying an export on the command line is deprecated.

** (process:29516): WARNING **: Please use a configuration file instead.
$

A quick check to see if it's running:

$ ps -eaf | grep nbd
root     29517     1  0 12:02 ?        00:00:00 nbd-server 2000 /dev/sr0
root     29519 29071  0 12:02 pts/6    00:00:00 grep --color=auto nbd

Mounting the CD

Now back on the Ubuntu client we need to connect to the nbd-server using nbd-client like so:

$ sudo nbd-client greeneggs 2000 /dev/nbd0
Negotiation: ..size = 643MB
bs=1024, sz=674983936 bytes

We can confirm that there's now a block device on the Ubuntu system using lsblk:

$ sudo lsblk -l
NAME                 MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda                    8:0    0 465.8G  0 disk 
sda1                   8:1    0   243M  0 part /boot
sda2                   8:2    0     1K  0 part 
sda5                   8:5    0 465.5G  0 part 
ubuntu-root (dm-0)   252:0    0 461.7G  0 lvm  /
ubuntu-swap_1 (dm-1) 252:1    0   3.8G  0 lvm  [SWAP]
sr0                   11:0    1 654.8M  0 rom  
nbd0                  43:0    0   643M  1 disk 
nbd0p1                43:1    0   643M  1 part

And now we mount it:

$ sudo mount /dev/nbd0p1 /mnt/
mount: block device /dev/nbd0p1 is write-protected, mounting read-only
$

did it work?

The suspense is killing me, and we have liftoff:

$ sudo ls /mnt/
EFI  GPL  isolinux  LiveOS

There's the contents of a LiveCD of CentOS that I mounted in the Fedora 19 laptop and was able to mount it as a block device of the network on Ubuntu.

Autoplaying & Automounting?

In the above setup I had to manually mount the DVD.

In investigating the plausibility of whether this approach would work with autoplaying and automounting, out of the box, Ubuntu's autoplay doesn't work but the nbd-client and nbd-server stayed up when I ejected the disk. When I put the DVD back in I was able to run the mount command on Ubuntu, which remounted the DVD just fine.

So I would assume you could stick a UDEV rule in on Ubuntu to detect this change and do the automount/autoplay automatically. I'm not gonna try it all out but I don't see anything that would lead me to think that it won't work.