Some of the protocols above can cope better with these conditions than others. Contrary to that, Internet connections offer a lot less bandwidth, usually asymmetric (much more download than upload) and the Internet has a rather high, very fluctuating latency, typically at leas some packet loss, data corruption can happen as well and the maximum transmission unit size can be much lower and is subject to change at any time even during an active transmission. Local networks typically offer a high amount of symmetric (upload equals download) bandwidth, very low and stable latency, very litte packet loss, almost no data corruption and a rather high and always constant maximum transmission unit size (MTU). This can often lead to issues when using these protocols over a VPN connection.Ī VPN connection typically runs over the Internet and the Internet has quite different network characteristics than a company or home network. All these protocols, except for WebDAV, have originally been designed to access files hosted on a file server located in the same network as the client accessing it. As of 2018, the most common protocols are SMB/CIFS (default for Windows and macOS 10.9 or newer), AFP (default for macOS prior to 10.9), NFS (default for Linux and most UNIX operating system), WebDAV (based on HTTP, vendor neutral).

To access volumes and files hosted on a file server, one of several available distributed file system protocols must be used.

Yosemite webdav server