Re: Moving from smbfs to cifs

Peter Wemm wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 9, 2008 at 11:02 AM, Garrett Cooper <yanefbsd_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>>        I was wondering if there's been any serious thought put into
>> migrating from smbfs (unmaintained project in kernel / userland since
>> 2001) to cifs (currently supported Samba project). This is the
>> mount_smbfs user tool that's available in userland.
> 
> I was surprised to discover that smbfs works as well as it does.  I
> really was expecting a whole pile of panics, lockups etc, but for my
> usage level, it seems to just work.  

The reason SMBFS probably works as well as it does is that servers 
(Windows, Samba, etc) are largely backwards compatible, so the older 
smbfs implementation on FreeBSD is able to talk to the appropriate 
servers using older protocols.

The main areas where SMBFS currently fails compared with whats available 
on Linux etc:

     - No support for DFS, which is a reasonably serious impediment
        in any enterprise environment using Windows servers
     - Performance is less than fantastic
     - Problems dealing with various character encodings in filenames
     - Doesn't use DNS to resolve hosts (that i know of?), only NetBIOS

The performance can be lived with in most cases, but the other points do 
pose varying impediments to more widespread use...

--Antony