I'm at the end of my wits here.. been trying for hours to get something seemingly simple to work..

First off, I'm not really a newbie, but I'm new here and inexperienced in mounting network shares in linux.

Setup I'm dealing with:
- FreeBSD server on the net
- LFS server locally.. (yes, this is giving me griefs.. long story, not going to reinstall any time soon)

I can go two ways here, so it's quite possible you needn't read beyond this:

1) Set up a network mount by using Samba (was a temporary set up for my windows workstation, but now I want a more permanent solution on my linux server)
2) but it seems to me that using samba between *nix servers is silly, so I've been working on RPC/NFS, which is turning out to be an epic fail..

So first off: is option 2 really worth the effort, or should I just stick with 1?


As for the RPC/NFS.. what a mess.. FreeBSD was relatively simple to set up. But one of the first things that bothered me is that I can't seem to firewall RCP in any way? (closed down everything, and still rpcinfo on my local server managed to detect RPC running on my internet server?! this seems like a huge security risk to me..)

Now, if I understand correctly, you need to run rpcbind on both machines to be able to mount. So I've been trying to compile rpcbind on my LFS server.. which turns out to be pure hell.. I've been downloading libraries and compiling them (often with errors, which I mostly managed to resolve). But the bottleneck seems to be libtirpc (which rpcbind depends on..).. LFS manuals haven't been much help either, cos rpcbind isn't in 6.2 (which I'm running)..

So yeah.. any bright ideas?

Btw, one of the reasons I switched was because mounting a samba share from my net server on my local server took -forever-.. but once mounted, mounting other shares was no problem.. not a big deal in the end, but I still want to set up SSH tunnelling, and waiting 1.5mins for any feedback/debugging info is just torture.. (funny thing is that mounting any other combination of samba/windows share and my servers is pretty much instantanious! :P )

Can't help any with compiling rpcbind, but the smb mount has to be due to a timeout somewhere. I would check DNS and make sure both forward and reverse lookups for both machines work. Also see if it is first looking for ipv6, timing out and then falling back to ipv4.

Thanks. I've dropped the entire rpc thing. I've found another possibility: sshfs.

This seemed a very painless solution. But alas, I'm having trouble with this as well. When I try to run sshfs, it gives me a error that mount doesn't recognise '--no-canonicalize'.. I got the latest FUSE, so I've tried updating mount, which is pretty hard to do as well! (long story).. right now, I'm stuck on errors during compiling util-linux.

So I still may go for the samba solution (in hindsight, I should've just stuck with it..), tho sshfs looks like what I really want. And yes, I think there's a timeout problem somewhere.. my guess is that my local server first tries to connect through one nic (local network) and then the other (internet)..

Will update if I got some solutions to post.

I got util-linux-ng-2.17.2 (lowest version with mount supporting '--no-canonicalize') instead of 2.20, which does compile.. yay!! So it works now.. and very well too!

Oh, to make it work with Samba, you need to have a /etc/fuse.conf with a line "user_allow_other", and add that option to the sshfs command as well ("-o allow_other")

Permissions are a bit weird due to windows/samba/local/remote.. but exactly in a way that I need them to be (I can add/edit remote files that I don't own through windows, but not rename/delete). So that's a bit of good luck

(I think the ability to edit and overwrite files without proper permissions is weird, but I'm not complaining!)