[pumkinut]

Samba is not that difficult to set up on a Linux, box, especially if done through something like Webmin. It's how I'm sharing all 8TB of my music and video files. I have Samba set up on my Ubuntu fileserver, and I'm sharing via SMB on my Synology NAS. Even though the Synology supports NFS, it's somewhat broken. I tried setting up and using NFS, but it caused nothing but problems. Samba and SMB/CIFS do work, they work well, and most of the problems encountered with them (besides permissions issues on both the MS and *NIX fronts) are PEBKAC errors.

[Preacher]

[in response to OttifantSir]: Conversely, my experience has been almost the flipside.

NFS "always works" for me, but that's because I'm used to configuring it between *nix boxes - Solaris in the early days and Linux in later days - so I know the pitfalls.

SAMBA has "mostly worked" for me, but I found there was a larger range of options to configure, many of which which differed according to the target platforms. Win95/98 had very few issues, but NT required a bit more thought due to a centralised security model, and Win2000 needed to run in hybrid mode before newer SAMBA permitted networking in native mode. WinME seemed flaky until I tuned a few parameters to reduce dropouts. WinXP required a workaround for the "SignOrSeal" issue; Vista and Win7 pretty much refused to work with SAMBAv2.0.

I feel Tridgell was always playing catch-up with Microsoft: no sooner did SAMBA work fine did an upgrade/update/patch/service pack make a subtle enough change to cause SAMBA to stutter. There's no reason why Windows users couldn't install an NFS client but SAMBA meant natively Windows users needed to do very little their end.

In terms of SAMBA becoming the defacto standard for sharing... that's news to me. There are a large amount of protocols out there for sharing - HTTP, FTP, SCP - and variety provides choice. But with the case of horses for courses, just because it doesn't work for you should not mean it doesn't work (and will never work) for anyone else.

When protocols like this are considered, both the server and client end should be considered. It's not uncommon to find more work at the server end means less at the client.

[Preacher]

Any other ideas what I could test within XBMC to compare NFS vs SMB?

An earlier post linked to an article in which someone tried copying a large file over both protocols to time them. I don't know if that copying functionality exists in XBMC, but perhaps you could drop into a terminal window and attempt the same thing via a command prompt.

most of the problems encountered with them (besides permissions issues on both the MS and *NIX fronts) are PEBKAC errors.

+1.

Most problems I've encountered tend to be ignorance, blissful or otherwise. SAMBA certainly seems to have a steeper learning curve with its myriad of options, but it shows that setting up network shares isn't actually a 5-minute task. For those that managed to do it in relatively quick time, they've usually picked default options that are suited to smaller networks, usually with low throughput, weak security and private community users.

[larysius]

As it pertains to XBMC/Kodi, I've just found that if I map my drives, then set up those drives as sources in Kodi, it's bypassing SMB all together. Since I've done this, I've had no problem streaming my pure blu ray mkvs over wifi without stuttering. I'm using windows 10 currently with Kodi 15.1 Isengard so I can't vouche for this over anything else, but it might be a solution for those wishing to avoid SMB while possibly getting NFSish results in windows too.

[nickr]

Drive mapping still uses smb.

[bossanova808]

Internal smb vs. external system xbmc...while it's sort of the same, and feels like it should, it's very often not in practise. On OE the SMB was (is?) crap for years, with a common hanging bug, and the well known solution was to externally mount via autofs.

[nickr]

Yes there is a difference between kodis internal libsmb and using the OS. But to the extent that the poster implied that he avoided smb altogether by using drive mapping, that's wrong.

[bossanova808]

oh for sure, yep, just trying to give the poster more explanation/context...