Hello, I just finished reading http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/NFS-HOWTO/

I have some NFS related questions and I hope you can help me a little:

I got two machines, one is called "woodcarver" and the other is called "ventanazul"

I have setup /etc/fstab in both machines to mount my NFS shares and it works ok, I can mount manually, as root, too, so I have one directory shared by woodcarver and accesses (mounted) from ventanazul and one directory shared in ventanazul and mounted from ventanazul, pretty simple.

So, NFS is working and I can share files.

My problem is when one of the machines is not powered on while the other one is started /etc/fstab can't find and mount the NFS share.

The only solution is to manually mount (as root) later.

Is there a way for woodcarver to ignore ventanazul being powered off and just have the NFS share mounted when ventanazul is up?

Regards!

yea, just ignore it... lol

Hi, that's what I did , and then I found in my desktop, Fedora Core 3, icons to the NFS shares, the user clicks and the share is mounted, even if the NFS server was down at boot time, I guess this is just calling "mount /path/to/mount" using settings from /etc/fstab.

I prefer the shell but my main concern was getting regular users (used to GUI's) mounting the shares

Regards!

change your desktop settings to only show 'mounted' disks.

i know you can do this in kde.

good luck.

Hi, yep, in KDE is done from: Control Center > Desktop > Behavior > Device Icons

But I'm ok with showing "umounted" disks, so users can mount shares that weren't available before.

By the way, how reliable is NFS?, yesterday I opened an OpenOffice file from one of my shares and saved, got an error when saving and later saw the file size was 0, so I lost the data.

After rereading the NFS HowTo I put "hard" and "intr" options in my /etc/fstab and it seems to be working without problems now, I can save from other boxes with no problem.

I also was having permission problems when using symlinks, for example:

woodcarver has /home/share as an NFS share, I have other directories in /home/alexis , for example /home/alexis/pics and I just "ln -s /home/alexis/pics /home/share/pics", my idea is that I only have to create an NFS for /home/share, however I can't access some files and permissions are not being honoured.

However, if I directly create the NFS share for /home/share/pics things work ok.

I verified UID and GID are the same in my two boxes, I guess NFS doens't interpret symlinks as it should be, or am I missing something?

Thanks!

Maybe you can write a small shellscript which checkes if NFS is mounted and if not, mount it. put that script in CRON for let's say... 5 minutes....


cheers