[SOLVED] Trying to add a NAS box over NFS to fstab

katto · 04-18-2015, 10:15 AM

I've got a D-link DNS-320LW that I'm trying to use as a remote backup box plus extra storage. The NAS box is connected to the wireless router with a standard ethernet cable and the connection of my pc to the router is over wifi. Its smb share function gets a bit complicated and seems to have issues with streaming so I'm looking into NFS. I can mount it fine with

Code:

sudo mount -t nfs 192.168.1.20:/mnt/HD/HD_a2 /mnt/NAS/

and it works perfectly with it. I tried to add it to fstab following the advice here since that guy seems to have a setup almost identical to mine. The fstab line I'm using is

Code:

192.168.1.20:/mnt/HD/HD_a2 /media/NAS nfs rw,hard,intr 0 0

but I don't see it mounted after a reboot. I've tried adding the _netdev option but I didn't see any improvements. Using showmount -e 192.168.1.20 when it's not mounted, I get

Code:

Export list for 192.168.1.20:
/mnt/HD/HD_a2 192.168.1.0/24

so it seems that it's at least visible after the boot. Any ideas on what I'm doing wrong?

(I'm also not sure intr is needed since the man page says it's deprecated. Seems proto=tcp should be added to ensure it uses TCP for transport and avoid data corruption during backups. I'd love to use NFSv4 with kerberos authentication but my experience with network shares is zero so I have no clue how to go about that.)

katto · 04-18-2015, 03:16 PM

After searching more I found others who had the same mistake. It seems that at least on laptops, the ethernet adapters initialise connections after logging in so fstab has already finished by then and _netdev won't make it wait that long.

There was one solution with a script here but I found a similar solution with less steps in a comment here which I adapted.

I adapted his script to my situation like this

nasmount.sh

Code:

#!/bin/sh

while true;
do
ping -c1 192.168.1.20 > /dev/null &&
break;
done

mount -t nfs -o rw,hard,intr 192.168.1.20:/mnt/HD/HD_a2 /media/nas

made the file executable, moved it into /etc/init.d, changed the ownership and group to root and run

Code:

sudo update-rc.d nasmount.sh 99 2 3 4 5

it gave me a warning

Code:

update-rc.d: warning: /etc/init.d/nasmount.sh missing LSB information
update-rc.d: see <http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts>
usage: update-rc.d [-n] [-f] <basename> remove
       update-rc.d [-n] <basename> defaults [NN | SS KK]
       update-rc.d [-n] <basename> start|stop NN runlvl [runlvl] [...] .
       update-rc.d [-n] <basename> disable|enable [S|2|3|4|5]
                -n: not really
                -f: force

The disable|enable API is not stable and might change in the future.

After rebooting, this still didn't work even though the script worked when I ran it as root. This is probably going to work eventually but it feels very clunky. Is there any other way to delay the nfs mounting in fstab until after the wireless adapter has connected to the router or maybe make the wireless adapter connect to the router before finishing the mount process?

katto · 04-18-2015, 06:11 PM

There are ways to allow the network manager to start a wifi connection before log in and let fstab properly mount the remote filesystems. There is a feature in the gnome network manager applet to "allow all users" to share the default connection. Unfortunately, whatever geniuses maintain the KDE network manager applet haven't included that feature in the gui in the last five years.

Whoever else is having the same problem and you're not running a multi-user system (i.e. you've got a computer with only one user or you don't mind sharing your default connection with multiple users on the same machine) just ditch the KDE network manager applet, WICD or whatever else you're using, install the gnome network manager applet, add it to autostart through system settings (if you're running KDE) and check the option to allow other users to share the connection and reboot.

Only problem with this method is that the wifi password will be stored in clear text. I'm not sure there's a workaround for that.