OS X and FreeBSD: What could be a good setup

[Doug Poland]

On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 08:04:35AM -0400, Bart Silverstrim wrote:
> >
> >>You see I'm in a state of confusion..
> >
> >You're simply using a FreeBSD as a file server.  You serve up
> >files to the client via NFS (OS X) or CIFS (Windows).  FreeBSD doesn't 
> >care.  Now if you want FreeBSD to understand and manipulate those 
> >files is a different issue.
> >
> 
> See, this is part of where I was getting a little munged up in trying 
> to figure out how I want to aim for renetworking my home...
> 
You're talking about three different issues here, Authentication, file
serving protocols, and wireless security.  

> I'm looking at using FreeBSD on a server (web, mail, file server) with 
> OS X, Windows, and probably Linux clients.  I'd like the FreeBSD server 
> to handle authentication, but that may be a pipe dream to accomplish 
> across platforms easily :-/
> 
Not sure where to point you for this but some type of LDAP scheme seems
a logical choice.

> For the file serving I was looking at NFS (especially using the NFS 
> server with Services for Unix under Windows), but the common 
> cross-platform version may too insecure to use comfortably, especially 
> with wireless (most of my wireless connections are wrapped in ssh if 
> they're important anyway).
> 
> That would leave SMB/CIFS, meaning SAMBA, but I haven't found anyone 
> able to tell me if CIFS is secure "over the wire".  I seem to recall a 
> utility that would sniff network packets and if NFS is used, it can 
> capture the files as they're travelling over the network; can this 
> happen with CIFS?
> 
> I would really rather NOT use mixed protocols to share; NFS for 
> Linux/OS X, CIFS for Windows...then I'd have increased overhead to 
> managing permissions, etc...
> 
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your choice of protocols is a different
issue from wireless security.  Here's a couple of good articles on
wireless and FreeBSD...

http://www.samag.com/documents/s=7121/sam0205a/sam0205a.htm
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2001/04/05/Big_Scary_Daemons.html


> Advice?
> 
I've never setup a wireless network, but I have connected PCs and Macs
to FreeBSD fileservers.  My suggestion would be to tackle your project
is discrete steps.

1. If possible, using a wired network, setup your authentication
scheme.

2. Configure your clients and server for file sharing.

3. Setup and configure for wireless network operation.

HTH

-- 
Regards,
Doug