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In Linux, specifically RHEL/CentOS 7.9, but anything equivalent or of a later version... if I wanted to mount a folder/directory from another Linux system across a network, all I am aware of is NFS, either NFSv3 or NFSv4.

Is there any other mount method, that is functionally comparable to NFS, for mounting some exported (shared) folder/directory from another Linux system on the network?

G-Man Says 'Reinstate Monica'
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ron
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    Do you have any specific issues with your NFS mounts? As "better" means different things to different people, I'm inclined to call the question opinion-based. – Kusalananda Oct 26 '22 at 21:09
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    https://maxammann.org/posts/2022/01/linux-file-system-comparison/ – Hack Saw Oct 26 '22 at 21:26
  • In my experience I have found that NFS was way more reliable for large file transfers (files of 8GB++) than SMB. Scenario: virtualised LAN on ESXi between two VMs. – roaima Oct 26 '22 at 21:41
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    @HackSaw I see multiple issues with that article, starting from claiming NFS isn't good at cryptography (it's good, but you need kerberos) to including things that are gio fuse mounted etc what they say about latency constraints of cifs is demonstrations untrue. It actually ignores the real NFS alternatives (gluster, ceph file) and whilst listing rather old http based protocols forgoes to address much more common file storage protocols like s3. SFTP is not based on WebDAV, that's plain wrong. So, maybe not the best article. – Marcus Müller Oct 26 '22 at 21:48
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    Btw I consider it safe to say that if NFS, then you want NFSv4. This isn't 1999. – Marcus Müller Oct 26 '22 at 21:53
  • @MarcusMüller I don't disagree, I was just trying to give OP a bit of info. I agree with Kusalananda that this question is going to be opinion, and so not appropriate. – Hack Saw Oct 26 '22 at 22:18
  • I want to know if NFS is going to be around and isn't going anywhere so I should fix my existing nfs issues rather than jump ship from NFS to something else. I will post a link to another post in a bit, which will be one question about an NFS problem I am having – ron Oct 27 '22 at 17:33
  • https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/722712/nfs-causes-linux-system-to-hang-doing-ls-or-df-for-example – ron Oct 27 '22 at 18:05
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    NFS is unlikely to go anywhere soon. V4 is pretty darned good on a stable network. – Hack Saw Oct 28 '22 at 13:47
  • Look into `SSHFS`. – Stephen Boston Nov 23 '22 at 15:28

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The two best options are going to be CIFS and NFS. On Linux, most likely you will experience much better reliability in NFSv4.

Yes, it has been a couple decades of NFS. There just doesn’t look like anyone is interested in starting over on an alternative. Many storage providers (e.g. NetApp) use NFS or iSCSI over 10gbe.

James Risner
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