I'm interested in experimenting with replacing our dependency on MKS with MS' Sevices for Unix toolset. I was wondering if anyone has any experience with deploying SFU on a shared drive? We like to, wherever possible, host our dev tools on one central NAS and call to the NAS to access the tools instead of rolling stuff out to each and every desktop.

I'm not interested in the NFS support or ActiveState Perl. Really, none of the daemon technology is required here. I'm looking for replacements for the coreutils/binutils stuff you find in Linux (and MKS on Windows): sed, awk, csh, bash, grep, ls, find -- the meat-and-potates command line apps that our build and test scripts are built around.

If I limit the install to just the Interix GNU Components (and maybe the Remote Connectivity components) will is run nicely from a shared location?

To head off some questions:

• Yes, I've looked at Cygwin. Unfortunately it's performance in our build and test environment is poor. It runs considerably slower than MKS and it's not a direct drop-in replacement for MKS (thanks to its internal pathing and limitations with commands like 'ps'), so it's a tougher sell.
• Yes, I'm looking at the MinGW offering in parallel to this.