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Comment by mixmastamyk | Hacker News Reader

What are most people using today for file serving? For our little lan sftp seems adequate, since ssh is already running.

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NFS v4.2. Easy to set up if you don't need authentication. Very good throughput, at least so long as your network gear isn't the bottleneck. I think it's the best choice if your clients are Linux or similar. The only bummer for me is that mounting NFS shares from Android file managers seems to be difficult or impossible (let alone NFSv4).

I think you can serve NFSv4 and also NFSv3 at the same time for those Android apps (e.g. Kodi).

Yes, that's what at least the `nfs-server` service on Fedora does by default. And VLC also supports v3 on Android… maybe they use the same implementation as Kodi behind the scenes? It's weird the v4 support is so spotty still, even though it has been around for two decades. Even NFS v4.2 is almost ten years old at this point.

SMB2 for high-performance writable shares, WebDAV for high-performance read-only shares, also firewall-friendly.

Sftp is useful, but is pretty slow, only good for small amounts and small number of files. (Or maybe i don't know how to cook it properly.)

SMB is great for LAN, but its performance over internet is poor. It remains SFTP and WebDAV in that case. SFTP would be my choice, if there is client support.

I suspect that NFS over Internet is also not the most brilliant idea; I assumed the LAN setting.

I just use sshfs for most things today. It's by far the simplest to set up (just run sshd), has good authentication and encryption (works over the internet), and when I measured performance vs. NFS and Samba some years ago it seemed roughly identical (this is mostly for large files; it's probably slower for lots of small files – measure your own use case if performance is important). I don't know about file locking and that type of thing – it perhaps does poorly there(?) It's not something I care about.

NFSv4 over WireGuard for file systems

WebDAV shares of the NFS shares for things that need that view

sshfs for when I need a quick and dirty solution where performance and reliability don't matter

9p for file system sharing via VMs

> What are most people using today for file serving?

Google Drive. Or Dropbox, OneDrive, yada yada. I mean, sure, that's not the question you were asking. But for casual per-user storage and sharing of "file" data in the sense we've understood it since the 1980's, cloud services have killed local storage cold dead. It's been buried for years, except in weird enclaves like HN.

The other sense of "casual filesystem mounting" even within our enclave is covered well already by fuse/sshfs at the top level, or 9P for more deeply integrated things like mounting stuff into a VM.

No one wants to serve files on a network anymore.

SMB has always worked great for me.

NFS! At least on my localnet.

Some NFS, lots of SMB, lots of sftp, some nextcloud, some s3. I wish that TrueNAS made webdav more of a first class service.

As nice as WebDAV would've been it's probably a non-starter in many scenarios due to weird limits, like Windows has a default size-limit of 50mb.

I'm tinkering on a project where I'd like to project a filesystem from code and added web-dav support, the 50mb limit will be fine since it's a corner-case for files to be bigger but it did put a dent into my enthusiasm since I had envisioned using it in more places.

200 TiB over Samba across 5 XFS volumes on md raid10 volumes. Time Machine-compatible.

Depends on the use-case. Myself I'm using NFS, iCloud, and BitTorrent.

sshfs for short-lived and single user serving. iscsi for network storage.

Nothing for multi-user or multi-client. Avoid as long as that is possible since there is no good solution in sight.

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