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Comment by dapperdrake

14 days ago

In short, NFS has a terrible data model and only pretends to be a file system.

Hence why even on UNIX people moved on from NFS, but on Linux it keeps being the remote filesystem many reach for.

  • NFS is more annoying on Linux than just using Samba though, at least for the NAS use case. With Samba on my server I can just browse to it in KDE's file manager Dolphin, and samba configuration is a relatively straight forward ini style file on the server. A pair of ports also need to be opened in the host firewall.

    Contrast that with NFS, which last I looked needed several config files, matching account IDs between hosts, mounting as root, and would hang processes if connection was lost. At least I hear rpcbind is gone these days.

    I don't think anyone sane uses NFS on Linux either these days. And it is rather funny that the protocol Microsoft invented is what stuck and became practical between Linux hosts.

  • For me it was the path of least resistance, I do use WebDAV more now since Copyparty supports it out of the box but I would be open to suggestions

No, any remote system would have the same problem if one expected to use it as if it were local.

  • Not quite. For persistence latency, yes.

    For read-only access there could be way better caching, especially for common use cases like listing the contents of a filesystem directory. But stuff like this was excluded on purpose.

    NFS is really stupid.

    NFS made the assumption that a distributed system with over 100 times the latency of a local system could be treated like a local system in every single way.

    • I am not sure why this means why "NFS is really stupid" if the user assumes that a distributed file system can be treated just like a local system. That is provides the same interface is what makes NFS extremely useful.

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    • It's wasn't "NFS", it was always the users that made that mistake. NFS can be used in a proper and productive manner, but it requires adjustments.

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