In the beginning, there was a large Windows network, with many clients and several servers. Into this world, the fresh new Linux
<snip> I know why it's here now. I don't see why we perpetuate it.
Another problem: I've never heard of any reasonably usable networked FS for Windows besides SMB/CIFS. Do you know more than me? If you do, can you name a few large sites that have been successfully running it so my (ficticious) PHB would feel safe to give the go-ahead to implement it?
NFS ;). Perry mentioned AFS, and that's the one I'm thinking of for the most part. It's a well designed distributed file system, and it works well. It's running on several large university networks - which in itself is probably sufficient to "prove" that it works in large environments, as I suspect a typical university network is larger that most corporate offices.