Exporting and Mounting NFS Volumes Under OS X

[ericmurphy]

I have a linux box on my network, quietly crunching seti workunits all day long. It's all the thing does. But it would be nice to use the machine as a file server too. I'm assuming the way to do that would be to export its filesystem as an NFS volume, which I can then mount on the OS X machines on my network.

So my question is really two-fold: 1) what's the process for exporting a filesystem under linux?; and

2) what's the procedure for mounting an NFS filesystem under OS X?

 

[onan]

On the linux side, man 5 exports. That'll give you the syntax for the /etc/exports file; once you've created that appropriately, exportfs -a will export the things listed there.

The only os10-specific catch is that you'll need to use the "insecure" option in the /etc/exports entry. (Which doesn't actually mean it's any less secure, just means that os10 likes to use high-numbered ports for these connections, while linux expects low ones. ((nfs is so blindingly insecure anyway that it couldn't really get any less so.))

(That's all assuming that you have the necessary daemons and kernel support installed. If that's not the case, and answer is well beyond the scope of this post.)

For the client side, you can mount by a number of different methods:

/Applications/Utilities/Netinfo Manager.app, using the mounts directory

From the shell with "mount servername:/path/to/export /path/to/local/mount/point"

With a third-party utility like NFS Manager

 

[rcnmr]

Once the Linux box is exporting, you can mount directly from the OS X desktop!

Select "Connect to server" under the "go" menu:

Enter: nfs://servername/pathtoexport.

rtn and The nfs disk is om the desktop!

i do this daily to SUN's. The only catch is that if the nfs server shutsdown before you unmount on the OS X box the finder is gracelessly hosed. Open a terminal, type top to get the process for the nfs mount.
contrl C to kill top and then kill -9 process#

good luck,
RC