This may seem like kind of an idiotic response, but having a similar situation this is what I did. I used FreeNAS run under VMWare GSX on the Windows server that had connection issues with Linux. The 36GB drive that normally would have had the files available to Linux and Solaris machines were moved to the FreeNAS machine. I created a 30GB drive in VMWare and set that up to be used by the NAS. Since then I have had no issues what so ever with the nix machines getting data. The latest version now supports users and groups. The only reason this is run on VMWare is that the host machine as Windows based services that unfortunetely can not be moved at the time. But, so far I have been extrememly pleased with how this setup has worked. This method has worked so well that now a couple of the Linux servers are now backed up to another data storage server using FreeNAS hosted in VMWare. As for using Windows as NFS, that has not been at all successful (Even running the Windows 2000 NAS Server). At the moment FreeNAS is still got a long way to go in terms of development, but there is another distro specicially made for NFS/NAS. I can not think of the name at the moment, but you can find it at distrowatch.com. Sean Waite -----Original Message----- From: "Wayne Johnson" <wjohnson at mqsoftware.com> To: <tclug-list at mn-linux.org> Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2006 11:49:58 -0600 Subject: [tclug-list] Exporting SMB shares > I have an interesting problem. > > We have a Windows server that contains a rather large number of files. We need to access these files from any machine on our > network (Unix, Linux, Windows, hey, even a Tandem and VAX). > > We have been using Services for Unix to create a NFS share on this windows server, but SFU is being a real pain. It tends to loose > configuration settings, and just crashes, quite often. Not to mention some security issues. > > My solution, was to add a new Linux machine (FC4) that can serve both NFS and SMB/CIFS. All is going great, but there is one > directory with our released software that I'm not quite willing to move for safety reasons (my Linux server does not have off site > backups). > > My brilliant solution was to do a smbmount of this folder onto my Linux machine, then do an NFS export. Stop laughing. > > Only problem is that NFS is too smart. It refuses to serve any files that are not local to my machine. At least that's what I've > found in my research. These same references also say there are other ways to do this, but doesn't give a hint to what they are. > Thanks a lot. > > I've tried sym-links from the NFS exported directory to a SMB shared directory, but NFS just serves the sym-link. > > Any other suggestions (besides shoving the Windows machine out a window on the 5th floor)? > > > Wayne Johnson > Senior Software Engineer > MQSoftware, Inc. > 1660 S Highway 100 > Minneapolis, MN 55416 > (952) 345-8628 > > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list