I've been using my Raspberry Pi as a music file server, but I'm not happy with it. The current setup uses a samba
server on my RPi with a WD Passport USB drive formatted as vfat
. This serves as the library for my Sonos music system: Sonos mounts the drive, and lists all of the music it finds there in a menu for me to choose from.
The Sonos interface seems to operate smoothly with the RPi Samba server most of the time. However, it does not work so smoothly with my MacOS. I use my Mac to maintain the music library, and there are two primary niggling issues:
- user permissions must be changed through the Samba configuration to enable deletions and additions in the music library
- browsing the Samba music share on my RPi in the Mac's Finder app reveals numerous "omissions & artifacts", whereas browsing a folder with exactly the same content on the NetgearNAS with CIFS is flawless; see the figure below.
A friend uses a NetgearNAS as the fileserver for his Sonos system. It works very reliably, and the "artifacts" do not show up in Finder. His NetgearNAS is configured to use CIFS
(and only CIFS). I'd like to try CIFS on my RPi, but my research so far has only added to my confusion.
Finally, my questions:
SMB and CIFS seem to be closely related, but are they "the same thing"? If not, what are the differences?
Some sources refer to CIFS as a file system (in the sense that
ext4
,FAT32
, etc. are file systems), while others refer to it as a networking protocol. As there is no CIFS extension formkfs
, references that refer to CIFS as a file system would seem to be misleading - or am I missing something?If CIFS is only a networking protocol, is it limited to a specific file system?; i.e. may one use FAT32 or ext4 with CIFS? Does the file system used with CIFS affect its use as a cross-platform server protocol?