Not being knowledgeable enough about these protocols and their relative advantage/disadvantages, can the people who downvoted this comment also write down why to help others? That always makes more sense when it's not obvious.
I think this is downvoted because it's considered slow and/or hacky and having a fair amount of overhead (especially for SSH -- e.g. User and Key management).
That being said, I think the explanation is not available because ... people aren't really sure about a better option!
If we take the common (IMO complex) Network filesystem protocol implementations as having irredeemable flaws (so SMB and NFS, all versions), the only viable contenders I can think of are block level network device protocols. E.g.: iSCSI, NBD, DRBD, and probably quite a few others. These of course have the disadvantage of exposing block level protocols to clients, leaving the actual filesystem management up to the client.
Summary: it's always a tradeoff and most of the options suck in one way or another. I personally wouldn't downvote this comment. But maybe someone could enlighten me.
WebDav didn't take off because no-one really felt like giving away a high quality implementation in kernel-space for Windows. And Microsoft viewed it as competition against SMB and their licensing model.
These are terrible alternatives once more than a half dozen people are involved.
SMB isn't about file transfer so much as the system around authorization and authentication. SSH/SFTP gives you highly secure access to unix file systems. There isn't a good interface to advanced ACLs.
Definitely agree, but the grand parent comment wasn't about authorization or authentication. But was about file transfer among a team on a local network. SSH/SFTP gives you that, but as I said it's not always an alternative because of the reasons you mentioned.
