Apple

hi,

I setup NFS on my PowerMac G5 Dual 2.3GHz machine. It works great and I am able to mount my volume,
/Users/mnorton

on my windows 7 PC.

However, I can't access the subdirectories in /Users/mnorton.

Do I need to create links for each subdirectory in my /etc/exports file?

The goal is to NFS mount my volume /Users/mnorton and have complete access in my INTRANET to all my subdirectories.

Also, my chicken of the vnc can no longer connect to this machine while the nfs is running. Port conflict??

What say you?

Mike

SMB might be easier…

Maybe you can share the line concerned in exports for everyone to take a look?

mnorton wrote: hi,

I setup NFS on my PowerMac G5 Dual 2.3GHz machine. It works great and I am able to mount my volume,
/Users/mnorton

on my windows 7 PC.

However, I can't access the subdirectories in /Users/mnorton.

Do I need to create links for each subdirectory in my /etc/exports file?

The goal is to NFS mount my volume /Users/mnorton and have complete access in my INTRANET to all my subdirectories.

Also, my chicken of the vnc can no longer connect to this machine while the nfs is running. Port conflict??

What say you?

Mike

I have never exported from a Mac but that should not be needed. Each mount point should be exported thats all.
Are you sure that you do not have some permission issues?

Here is my /etc/exports

Power-Mac-G5-2:~ mnorton$ more /etc/exports
/Users/mnorton -mapall=mnorton -network 10.0.0.0 -mask 255.255.255.0

Also, something of interest. I couldn't NFS mount my itunes directory.



I wasn't granted access from the remote machine to enter the ~/Music directory.

Mike

If you're sharing to Windows, just use SMB -- you'll save a lot of headache.

But, if you're determined to try, you might throw in an -alldirs and/or -32bitclients, since I don't know how good or current Windows' NFS client implementation is.

This is from Windows 2k, but might still be relevant : (thanks to josehill ) Windows Services for Unix works on ID's , not names. So you can have the same user and group on both machines but still have problems. Get the group and user id's to match.

Also, I have noticed that network discovery on the Windows machine is brain-dead. It can't find hosts by name very well, but once you discover them by the IP, then Windders does better.

Setting permissions on the Windows host is awful. It's all over the place and doesn't make sense. It might be easier to get the basics working from another computer that has a better implementation of NFS before you tackle the Windows end (if possible.) Then at least you know the serving part is working correctly.

hamei wrote: This is from Windows 2k, but might still be relevant : (thanks to josehill ) Windows Services for Unix works on ID's , not names. So you can have the same user and group on both machines but still have problems. Get the group and user id's to match.

Thanks for the thanks, hamei.

Minor point: the UID thing is a Unix thing, not a W2k thing. The Unix kernel (and hence anything that works with it, like NFS) tracks users and groups by numeric user identifiers (UIDs) and group identifiers (GIDs).

For example, let's say that there is an account named "josehill" with UID = 47291, and that account belongs to a group called "knuckleheads" with GID = 91356. Technically, as far as Unix systems are concerned, the account is 47291, and it belongs to group 91356. The "josehill/knuckleheads" combo is completely arbitrary and irrelevant to the system - it is nothing more than an easily remembered alias for the convenience of human users.

Conversely, if there is an account with UID = 47291 called "josehill" on one system and an account with UID = 47291 called "hamei" on another system, the two Unix systems will treat the "josehill" and "hamei" accounts as if they are the same account -- because they are the same account, i.e. account # 47291.

So, when using a Unix technology (like NFS) to connect to a system that uses a different model for identifying users (like Windows), you need to configure a mapping between the Unix user model and the other system's model. That's the step that hamei (correctly) called "awful" when working with Windows Services for Unix. He also could have said "clumsy, torturous, abusive, maddening, etc."

My guess is that this mapping was not correctly performed between the original poster's Mac and PC. With default security and sharing enabled on the Mac, /Users is visible, so a Windows machine should be able to see the names of the user directories within the Mac's /Users directory. However, unless the UID issue is sorted out, the Windows machine will not be able to see what is inside those directories.

I agree with the other people who have suggested using the Mac's SMB file sharing, especially with a small network. It's FAR, FAR easier to configure sharing between a Mac and Windows machine using Windows file sharing tech than it is to use NFS. I'd only bother with configuring Windows machines to use NFS if you are managing a dozen or more machines, and NIS/NFS is already the standard for file sharing and directory services in your organization.

ISTR that (various versions of) Windows default to mounting with the special UID/GID combo of -2/-2 which NFS usually translates to the "nobody" user and group. Naturally "sensitive" directories like homedirs and suchlike are not accessible by the special nobody user.
In versions before Windows 7 SFU you could set up user and group mappings in a file; not so with 7 and 8. It's either the ten-ton gorilla of ActiveDirectory or edit the registry manually to change the defaults. The registry paths are readily googled and I CBA to do it for you at the moment.

I assume the mapall flag would override any UID issues?

I'd suggest you get another UNIX/Linux to mount the NFS share to make sure the G5 is serving the NFS share correctly, before we decide where the fingers should be pointed.

Maybe stating the obvious, do you have firewall on the G5? I'm just not sure if ipfw is smart enough to let things through…