I have never been able to figure out how to get my Mac to mount a NFS share from my linux box in the first place...

I remember the NextStep days, so mounting nfs volumes is old hat.

Probably the simplest way is to create an fstab file containing the nfs volumes you want to mount:

<pre>
foo.com:/media /Users/lindner/media nfs rw,intr,bg,rsize=16384,wsize=16384 0 0
foo.com:/home/lindner /Users/lindner/stuff nfs rw,intr,bg,rsize=16384,wsize=16384 0 0
</pre>

Then load it into netinfo like so:

<pre>
niload fstab . < /etc/fstab
</pre>

The automounter should pick up on this right away. It mounts things in /private/automount/actual/path/name and creates a symbolic link to the mount point.

Nice part about this is that everything is mounted on first use, no matter who logs in.

Is there more information on this, aimed specifically at sharing
NFS volumes from linux to OSX? These's hints are a little over
my head.

You might find NFSmanager to be of help.

http://www.bresink.de/osx/NFSManager.html


It is extremely straightforward using this. It is not at all straightforward without it. The documentation is superb.

It is uncrippled shareware -- ie, pay $15 if you like it and want to. In other words, try it out first.

Yeah - me either - I have tried Samba, netatalk, and NFS...
occasionally I can make a connection, but repeating the process
is futile. I can type "scp ....." faster if all I want to do is move
files.

... I would like the ability though.

All I ever get when I try to conncet to my Linux Server:

(on the mac)
NFS Portmap: RPC Port Mapper Failure -RPC : Timed Out

I can't tell you how many forums and mailing lists I have posted
that error msg on and no one seems to know what it is. Well
whatever it is - it happens when I try to connect to my Linux
server via NFS and it continues to fill up my logs until I
reboot.

/home           68.166.39.0/255.255.255.128(rw,insecure)
/media          68.166.39.0/255.255.255.128(rw,insecure)
/var/www/html   68.166.39.0/255.255.255.128(rw,insecure)

thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you !!!!! i have been posting everywhere myself on this question. i do happen to have root on the linux server- but what if i hadn't. how do I specify that the automounter should communicate on a "secure" port? just in case...

pass the -P option to mount, or add it to the opts property of your mount in netinfo.

cheers.

If you mount an nfs partition from the finde (Command+K),
such as nfs://myhostname/exportdirectory i thought write access
was not possible? I've tried getting remote writing to work
before and had no luck in OSX through the finder. For example,
if you mount a ftp site where you have write or delete access,
you still can't write or delete. Is that just for FTP?

---
- Tristan

To get my export mounted on osX as a writeable volume I had to make sure the uid/gid were the same on MacOSX and FreeBSD.
so my /etc/exports file looks like this:
/AD0 -alldirs -maproot=1001 192.168.0.2

Be careful on FreeBSD. it's different syntax than the linux exports file. the (rw, insecure) doesn't work.
I changed my uid/gid in netinfo manager on mac from 501 to 1001 to macth them on FreeBSD. be careful as you will loose customization of your Desktop and Finder and may have to "chown -R username:groupname /Users/username" after you do that as most of your files /folders in /Users/username will be owned by the previous uid, namely 501 for most default user accounts from original install.

I can't get this to work.. No matter what I change the value in the nfsiod file to... I always get around 950-1000kb/s of write speed.
I have the same problem with SMB, which is why I'm trying out NFS now. Thogh with SMB, I can write at full speed to the server, but when I edit id3-tags of songs on it, it's really slow. A solution for that would be nice too if anyone knows, and if it's not too much off-topic :)

Working out network performance bottlenecks can be difficult. You might check if all your machines are using full-duplex connections. Use the nfsstat command to look for excessive retransmissions.

Started off with reasonable nfs write speeds (2Mb/s) but terrible read speeds (worse; dropping to Finally discovered that killing all my nfsiod processes returned my read speed to normal; with default block sizes (32kb in both directions, nfs version 3) I now get around 4Mb/s in both directions. Not clear whether this is something specific to my setup, or particular server.

The server is a linux box running nfs-kernel-server. The only other box on the network is a linux laptop and sees good performance in both directions.

Hope this helps someone.

[ Reply to This | # ]

I've found that the single most important thing to improve performance is to export the mount on the server with "async". note that the default used to be async on linux until recently, now it defaults to sync.

i'm talking about the difference between ~400KB/sec and 3MB/sec here on large files (30-40MB), over gigabit ethernet. (as a reference this link was able to do 16MB/sec using ftp on large files-- nowhere near gigabit speeds but more than 100mbit ethernet and possibly within reason since OSX does not support jumbo frames)

anyway async can be dangerous if the server crashes as the client is told that writes have been committed before they actually have. however NFSv3 is supposed to have some features that make async mounts "safer", but its unclear whether OSX is actually using these. i suppose if it conforms to the NFSv3 spec then it will...