Manual Account Creation One minor annoyance with both Hummingbird's and Intergraph's solutions is that accounts are not automatically created. With Hummingbird's NFS Maestro Gateway, NIS serves as a user input tool for the gateway. Also worth noting is that with Hummingbird's product, as well as with the other products we tested, simply changing your NIS password map doesn't change access throughout; you also must change your gateway password. We would have preferred the functionality found in tools like ypbind, which perform a direct NIS lookup when an account is processed.

NFS Maestro's administration interface is adequate. It doesn't offer all of the features found in WRQ's product, for instance, but it remains an effective management interface that's easy to use and effective at translating NFS into SMB.

WRQ Reflection NFS Gateway 7.0
WRQ has improved its core product line, and those improvements are obvious in the latest version of Reflection NFS Gateway. To say the least, we were quite impressed. Only performance and price hold WRQ's solution back from the top spot. WRQ offers a solid solution for bridging the worlds of NFS and SMB. It adds features like separate password file mappings for each share, real-time statistics, permission translation--which is second to none--and centralized remote-gateway management. The company also has put an incredible amount of effort into the automation of mundane tasks.

With its NIS browser, we were able to quickly set up our NFS services. The browser had no problem importing our NIS maps--5,100 total entries. The method used to browse the entries is elegant and easy to use. With just a few clicks of the mouse, we created all 5,100 Windows NT accounts and set default NT user options for them. This simple operation saved us a lot of time.

The incorporation of real-time statistics is a feature particular to WRQ. Although not always essential, real-time statistics can pinpoint potential network problems. With Reflection NFS Gateway, you can determine how much work your NFS gateway is handling. We were able to gather details on parts of the gateway, such as the number of remote calls, memory used, size of the cache, number of cache hits and even the number of open files.

Simultaneous Mapping We found the integration of permissions into the Reflection NFS Gateway close to amazing. WRQ can handle Unix and Windows NT permissions simultaneously by mapping the Windows NT permissions on top of existing NFS permissions. In addition, Reflection NFS Gateway keeps separate Windows NT-to-NFS user ID mappings for each NFS share from the gateway. This lets you further control the use of your gateway. For example, users from one share can be locked out of other NFS shares.

Another feature found only in Reflection NFS Gateway is its remote-server management. From one console you can manage all the gateways on your network. And because WRQ uses Microsoft Windows NT calls to accomplish this management, it fits seamlessly into Windows NT.

Intergraph Corp. AccessNFS Gateway
Although Intergraph's AccessNFS didn't place high in our review, it's a workable solution. Not as feature-rich as the solutions from Hummingbird and WRQ, and somewhat lacking inperformance and administration, Integraph's AccessNFS is a solid solution ready for large-scale implementation.

One of the first things we noticed about AccessNFS, unlike the other contenders, it will not let you enter custom user IDs. With Maestro Gateway and Reflection NFS Gateway, we were able to correlate NT user names to NIS or Unix password file user names within. In contrast, Intergraph requires that user IDs be specified in NIS maps or through Unix password files. This solution may be useful in preventing mistakes or configuration problems, for example, but it also limits your options.

PacketSmart Boost? While testing AccessNFS, we were hoping to see a performance boost due to its PacketSmart technology, which tunes retransmission times and grooms packets to reduce the overall number of packets on the network to increase performance.

Such tuning would be useful on congested networks, but we found no apparent advantage on our high-bandwidth test network.