I haven't used NFS since the days of NFS3. It was manageable then, but I get the impression NFS4 is harder to administer? But it has in-transit encryption, a huge step up from NFS3. I could be wrong about the difficulty as I haven't actually tried to set it up. My house has only Linux boxes, but I have an SMB server because A) I find it easy to manage (you may not, but I have many years experience with it), and B) I have Windows-based visitors who (rarely) use the share. The machine in question isn't what most would think of as a NAS: it's just a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4G memory and a single 1TB SSD attached. It's been excellent and entirely stable for a couple years now. However ... my backups from my main computer to another machine are done over SSH to an `rsnapshot` server (with two ZFS mirrored 6T spinning drives). I don't use the Samba share for backups, partly because I have less faith in its in-transit encryption. If I were starting over, I would probably try to set up NFS4 - it allows Unix user/group management and Linux file systems, which aren't really possible with a Samba server. But you seem to have Windows in the mix, so I think Samba is the better choice? Samba is old, stable, and maintained: I think it'll work well for you. A lot of people use bundled NAS software, which usually has checkboxes to decide what underlying FS, or what network protocol. I've found installing and managing them worse and more complex than doing a regular Linux install and firing up Samba. As always, YMMV. I hope this helps. On Thu, 22 Jan 2026 at 14:53, William Park via Talk <talk@lists.gtalug.org> wrote:
To those running NAS,
I'm thinking about turning my current i3-4170 desktop into NAS.
What protocols do you use? Do you run both "NFS" and "SMB" on it? Or, just "SMB"? ------------------------------------ Description: GTALUG Talk Unsubscribe via Talk-unsubscribe@lists.gtalug.org Start a new thread: talk@lists.gtalug.org This message archived at https://lists.gtalug.org/archives/list/talk@lists.gtalug.org/message/KAMKL6J...
-- Giles https://www.gilesorr.com/ gilesorr@gmail.com