What is NFS (Network File System)?
NFS is the Network File System developed by Sun Microsystems in the 1980’s for sharing disk drives across a network. It was developed for use with Unix systems. It also became a standard at many sites for providing network disks to PC’s as well. NFS has an excellent track record for network drive access as well as management of these resources. Meanwhile on Windows SMB evolved to be a standard it has some shortcomings that have never been addressed. The advent of SAMBA (SMB on Unix) was an attempt to bridge SMB shared disks to Unix machines. However, SAMBA cannot overcome the shortcomings of SMB. Couple of these shortcomings include the lack of case-sensitivity in file and directory names and inconsistent file information. These shortcomings make it difficult to use SMB in a mixed OS environment. On the other hand, NFS has shown itself to work better in this mixed OS environment. Coupled with the use of NFS on Windows is the User Name Mapping (UNM) service. This allows the mapping of W
