Gentoo as NFS Server and Windows 7 Clients
 

Since Windows 7 came around I have had issues with NFS. I'm not sure when it happened but sometime within the last month (possibly a windows update) things have become horrible. Previously I was able to unmount and remount from windows, but I must reboot the windows machine to begin to get a mount going.

I have used the mount and net use methods, they both behave about the same, and persist never works. If I do get a mount working, it will stop working, only rebooting windows fixes it - the share will work just fine on other win7 machines. at this time, so it is not the server.

Long ago I was able to save from photoshop directly to the share, now this only creates a usually zero-byte temp file on the share. Any attempt to edit an existing file will fail, I have to delete it and copy it over. Windows thumbnails also fail to generate or update randomly.

At this point I can mount if I am lucky, I can see directory structure and filenames. Accessing files is next to impossible.

I have had the same NFS settings for many years... The purpose of the NFS share is to keep anything important safely stored on the raid array that is the NFS share.

Unfortunately search engines think I am having trouble with a video game so I am having to ask here. I was going to post on the official gentoo forums but it appears my username is inactive and it doesn't like my email.

The goal is to have the lightning fast NFS share accessible and wide open or read only (based on the share mounted) for my windows 7 machines.

If anyone has NFS working with Windows 7 please let me know how you have it setup. I know my machines are free of virii and malware, firewall is disabled and no 3rd party apps that would get in the way. The network is ipv4, simple and on the same subnet so it is not something wrong there.

Thanks!

Well thanks for thinking of LQ :)

Now can you post your tcpwrapper and exports/imports etc. configs? How about iptables -L for anything weird?

When did you first have this problem? Did you track that back to a KB article at mACROsFOt or security update that you can remove, or have you tried removing updates to the point where these issues don't occur?

How about snapshots of your win7 boxes? can you rollback those to a previous date that is known to be prior to the issues presenting themselves?

The easiest solution, or course, is to stop paying someone licensing fees for a crap operating system. Are you having these issues when you mount from a UNIX box? No? That might be additional incentive to dump that crap operating system forevermore that you've been paying licensing fees on.

What does uname -a yield when you check your kernel version? the Linux 3.7x series of kernels have some kewl support for the new NFS which supports some really neat features.

Just thought I'd throw some ideas out there you might be able to consider and tackle yourself, since you seem competent enough to take the lead and charge ahead on a notion :)

But I'm not kidding about ditching wYND0z3. That's obviously a problem and I can't think of a reason why someone needs it either.

My exports file is pretty simple...

I have played with a few things in exports, but nothing appears make a difference.

This is for use at home so I don't bother with snapshots or management on that level as far as windows goes. Unfortunately I need windows for more than a few things. I am running kernel 2.6.38 and my iptables rules haven't changed since I had to update them for the net / xfilter changes. The server / NFS machine is not beefy and the kernel has been working for a long time. I see no need for anything newer at the moment - if it was a beastly desktop, I would be bleeding edge on the kernel side.

I do occasionally need to mount this share on linux vm's and I can't recall it giving me trouble.

So yeah I know it is something wrong with windows, but I'm also sure I'm not the only person having issues. I also had similar issues under Ubuntu (as the server), but Ubuntu was worse. Random fails and blackouts, never able to recover, had to reboot the server every few days - obviously not what you want from a server.

I'm open to try just about anything at this point.

Thanks!

I've to say tallship is making sense. NFS is great, NFSv4 is safe even over untrusted network. But for Master Foo's sake, why Windows? If you want to use Windows bend over and learn CIFS. Can't help you there, last Windows in my household died in 2003 with BSoD. As a side note, there is no limitations to share a network volume over different protocols. You can share it over NFS, ATALK, FTP, HTTP, CIFS, whatever, concurrently.

As far as windows goes - yes I hate it too, the problem is my wife can't use, and somehow finds a way to break linux. She is also a diehard photoshop fan and she hates macs.

Right now things are working pretty good, but they are a bit quirky and slow sometimes.

I added this:

I had a few of those before, but for whatever reason it is behaving for now.

Should I upgrade my kernel? It is a 'server only' Atom based machine so I don't need a lot of zazz.

Thanks