[geeks] Secure network filesystem questions

[Micah R Ledbetter]

I currently have a Solaris Express machine (Sun Blade 100) sharing  
500GB of storage via NFS. I'm on a pretty open network (one house  
with 25 people and a shared wireless network - yes, really), and I'd  
like to secure the access to the Solaris machine. The only clients I  
have (for now) are Mac OS X clients.

Looking at the official docs, it seems like I need NIS/NIS+ to do  
secure NFS - is that true? I'm hesitant to implement NIS because I  
have zero experience with it, and I'd rather not introduce extra  
complexity since I don't want to tinker with (AKA break) the NFS  
server machine any more than I have to. It's housing my data, after all.

Is there another option for secure networked filesystems, supported  
by Solaris and OS X? The only other thing I could come up with was  
sshfs (via MacFUSE[0], which is still in beta) or WebDAV over https.  
Are there any benchmarks comparing those to encrypted NFS on a 11-100  
Mbit LAN?

  - Micah

[0]http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/