VPN + NFS vs SSHFS

Question

I have a home "server", and up to now I've been using it to mount my Music drive on my work PC using SSHFS. Never had any problems.

Last week I bought a Raspberry Pi, and have set it up as sort of a file server - accessing music/videos across my home network and from work, etc. Mainly due to the much lower power consumption, so I feel less guilty leaving it on 24/7.

HOWEVER - whereas before I was using an old Quad Core PC with 4GB ram, performance may now be an issue - the Raspberry Pi only has a 700MHz CPU and 256mb RAM. For that reason (I assume) I'm getting a lot more performance issues. Sometimes it works fine, sometimes it drops connection, sometimes music starts playing and then just hangs for a minute, etc.

So I'm considering setting up the Pi to be a VPN server, with the Music drive shared via NFS.

Is there any clear cut answer of which method generally performs better (or faster)? (ie, SSHFS vs VPN & NFS). Or is one more reliable than the other? I'm new to VPNs and can't find a definitive answer - if there even is one.

Part of me wants to think SSHFS is being flakey, but like I said - it always worked fine until I switched to using the Pi, so I doubt it's that.

On top of that, if the answer is a VPN, is there likely to be any benefit to using UDP over TCP or vice versa? I know TCP utilizes error checking, so I'm wondering whether choosing one over the other could increase performance.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

For a low power environment I'd suggest you just stream the audio directly using something like mpd (http://www.musicpd.org/) and control that via a front-end or console. Avoid unnecessary complexity.