nfs or cifs?

[loonsailor]

My ReadyNAS server, which I use for movies and music, will export its files either cifs/smb or nfs. Has anybody done any testing as to which is "better"?

I've used smb in the past, but the problem I've run in to is that when the system boots, the NAS often isn't mounted, even though it's in fstab. I think this is because I have the NAS set to spin the disks down when inactive, and mount.cifs won't wait for them. mount.nfs seems to try longer, so I think it may mount the NAS more reliably, though I haven't tested it much yet.

[RocKKer]

At work we use NFS all over the place. One thing we've learned is to mount NFS filesystems after the system comes up, sometimes they don't get mounted if you put NFS in the fstab and have it automount.

Or maybe you set Ready/NAS to not spin down the disks.

[aflat]

If you can use it, look at automout. Putting it in the fstab has issues where if the server is unavailable, the link is dead. automount mounts the connection when the request happens, and keeps it alive for I think 120 seconds. If you try to connect again after 120 seconds, it will try to reconnect again.

It can make for some odd listings, as "ls /mnt/auto" might show an empty directory, but "ll /mnt/auto" will show contents, since it has to connect to get file info. It might be slower making those new connections all the time, but not when it's 1 or 2 connections every few minutes or hours.