From my own experience, no real depth of knowledge here... I use NFS for my home shares. Painless with automount and nfsv4. I can't speak to widespread use in enterprise, but as a "casual" nfs user, it gets the job done nicely. I share a folder called ark from one of my servers and mount it on all of my machines. The ark lives on a mirrored zpool that is frequently snapshotted to another mirrored zpool on another server (I'm less of a zfs casual user, but that's an aside). I haven't lost a bit this way in the couple of years since I stood up the nfs share and I offloaded about 1TB of stuff I like to have on hand to the server. I tried Samba, ick, seems like windowism to me and I tried some NAS stuff, but nfs was fastest and simplest. I haven't really found anything better that works as painlessly as nfs, though I do look into alternatives every so often.

What else to try?

Thanks,

Will

BTW, my own opinions abut NFS can be seen in my "NFS Must Die!" talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF_djcccKc&ab_channel=TomLyon

Not that NFS *was* bad - but it *is* bad (for non-casual use).

Like the C language, it was great for its time.  Not so much anymore.

On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 9:24 AM Peter Weinberger (温博格) via TUHS <tuhs@tuhs.org> wrote:

It was a research proof-of-princple. (i.e.. partly principled and
partly really hacky. My list of its issues was pretty long.)

(If A mounted B's file system somewhere, and B mounted A's, then the
directory tree was infinite. That's mathematics, not a bug.)

On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 11:56 AM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:18:34AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
> > On Wed, Aug 13, 2025 at 10:00???AM Douglas McIlroy
> > <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
> > > I was always sorry that Peter Weinberger's RFS never made it outside
> > > Bell Labs. It allowed networking between separately administered
> > > systems by mapping UIDs.
> >
> > I believe it did?  If I recall correctly, it was available with System
> > V, though perhaps I am misremembering.
>
> Sunos had it, my office mate ported it.  I was unimpressed, it worked well
> between the same archs but was riddled with byte order problems and
> ioctl calls that were not portable.