Two random SMB/Samba questions

[Kurt Granroth]

I have a couple of SMB/Samba questions.  Neither are terribly important, but 
I'm curious nonetheless.

1. There seems to be a general feeling that NFS is a better distributed 
filesystem than SMB.  Why?  What advantages does it have?  Any links to 
sites that discuss this?

FWIW, I usually have both an NFS and SMB server running on my servers.  The 
"public" drives are SMB so my (getting fewer but still there) Windows 
machines can access them and the Unix-only filesystems are exported with 
NFS.  But while configuring my latest system, it occured to me that I 
really had no idea why I should do the NFS one at all.  SMB has worked 
great for me and is trivial to setup.  So why is it that SMB gets such a 
bum rap?

2. As I said above, it is trivially easy to setup a samba server.. but I 
still encounter an odd bug every now and them.  Sometimes when I try to 
access my shares on a windows machine, it won't connect to it using the 
hostname until AFTER I first connect to it using the IP address.

For instance, when I start a windows machine and go to Network Neighborhood, 
I can see all of my samba hosts in my workgroup.  No problems there.  If I 
click on, say, the USERMODE host, though, it usually gives me a "can't 
access the host" error.  I then manually type in  "\\192.168.1.148" which 
is USERMODE's IP address and it works.  From then on, I can access the host 
using it's name ("\\USERMODE\") instead of it's IP address.  It's as if the 
name browser correctly finds the hostname, but it can't quite make the 
connection between the name and the IP address until you manually try it.

Anybody run into a similar problem?

Thanks,
-- 
Kurt Granroth - currently .sigless