Writing at LinuxPlanet, Bill von Hagen offers the first part in a series examining networked filesharing on Linux. This installment provides an introduction to filesystems under Linux. Additional articles will provide tutorials about installation, configuration and other topics . . .

“The ability to share disks, directories, and files over a network is one of the most significant advances in modern computing, reducing local disk space requirements and making it easy for users to collaborate without ending up with hundreds of versions of the same files. Personal computers running Microsoft Windows and Apple's MacOS and Mac OS X inherently support sharing disks and directories with other systems of the same types. Linux and Unix systems traditionally use the NFS network filesystem in order to do the same sort of thing.”

“NFS is the best-known network file-sharing mechanism for Unix, Linux, and related operating systems because it is included in most Unix-like operating system distributions and is trivial to configure. NFS is supported in the Linux kernel and NFS-related utilities are provided with every Linux distribution. However, a number of more modern mechanisms for sharing files and directories over networks are available for today's Linux systems. Each of these can provide significant administrative and usability advantages for sites running Linux . . . “

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