Microsoft® Windows Server 2003: Administrator’s Companion

File Systems

Windows Server 2003 network file sharing is based on the traditional Microsoft networking mechanism of server message blocks (SMB). UNIX systems, on the other hand, use the Network File System (NFS)—originally developed by Sun Microsystems—to share file systems across the network. To allow Windows Server 2003 and UNIX to share a common file system, you need to add SMB to your UNIX systems or NFS to your Windows systems—both are feasible. Until the original release of SFU, only third-party NFS solutions were available for Windows systems that needed to be able to share file resources with UNIX systems, and most of these solutions were expensive and problematic. The biggest issue was their inability to keep up with Microsoft Windows ...