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	F E A T U R E

Increasing File Access Through SMB March 6, 2000 By Jeff Ballard If your IT environment is like most, you maintain a delicate balance between your users, on Microsoft Windows-based PCs, and your servers, which probably run both Windows NT and Unix. You want to give your users the file access they need in as uncomplicated a manner as possible. You can use NFS (Network File System) to give your NT clients access to Unix files, but that's a pain. An alternative is SMB (Server Message Block), a file-sharing protocol used by Microsoft to share files in its operating systems. SMB was released in 1984, when IBM introduced NetBIOS to share files over networks. The advantage to using an SMB server is that it's stable, relatively easy to set up and easy to get. In addition, using an SMB server for Unix lets you perform certain management tasks for your Windows NT clients from your Unix server. In effect, implementing an SMB server at a mixed NT-Unix site lets you centralize your entire computing infrastructure on one server platform. At least that's the goal. Our tests revealed that while these packages will enable that centralization, their management capabilities are not yet fully baked. We tested a trio of Unix SMB servers--the open source Samba 2.0.6, Compaq Computer Corp.'s Advanced Server for Unix 4.1 and Syntax's TotalNet Advanced Server 5.4--in our Real-World Labs® at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and found the management interfaces in two of the products are less than stellar. The exception is Compaq Advanced Server for Unix; though limited to the Tru64 operating system, it is the only product that let us centralize our configuration on one machine. Neither Samba nor TotalNet could stand up to that challenge--each server needed to be configured individually. Because of the lack of a common hardware and systems platform in our tests, we chose not to focus on performance. We determined that SMB servers typically are used to solve system-integration problems, and as such, most are chosen on the basis of setup, server platform support, features, configuration and price. If performance is a major issue for you, it's likely that NFS or another protocol will be a better fit at your site. Crossing the finish line first was the open source product, Samba. This software earned our Editor's Choice award because of its ease of use and its complete feature set. Compaq's Advanced Server for Unix was a close second, and bringing up the rear was Syntax's TotalNet Advanced Server. On the face of it, the Compaq product lagged behind Samba only on price, while TotalNet received lower grades for both its GUI and its features. But Compaq's software has an additional disadvantage that makes Samba the clear choice: Compaq Advanced Server runs only on Compaq servers under its Tru64 version of Unix. For Compaq sites, that's fine; for sites with other versions of Unix, it's a problem. Samba provides a well laid-out configuration file, and it's fast. However, the software doesn't have all the management features of Compaq Advanced Server for Unix; it lacks a nice default GUI and strong ACL (access control list) support. We'd particularly like to see the latter, but only if it could be added without hindering portability. In the end, though Samba is an open source solution, it's a quality product that we strongly recommend.
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