Hi guys,

I am new to the whole NFS thing but I managed to get NFS working and was able to mount and access some directories using NFS. I ran into a situation that I don't know how to get around:

I exported the directory /share through NFS, and I am able to mount it from other machine, I went to the NFS Server machine and mounted a vfat hard disk on /share/mybook

when I do ls /share from other machines, i can see the directory listed but when i cd to it and list it, i get nothing even that the hard disk has some files ( i am able to see them on NFS server using ls /share/book)

please let me know how can I list and have access to vfat mounted directory on the NFS server from remote machines?

Thanks

Bro just google "samba" , its an excellent nfs helping application

no, you know what, i guess i'll have to mount to vfat directory separately, i've come to realize that "we mount file systems and not directories"!

Was the vfat partition mounted after the nfs server started? If you put an entry in /etc/fstab, you should be able to share it.

Also, watch the options when you mount the vfat filesystem. Fat32 doesn't contain Linux inodes so you need to determine the ownership and permissions of the entire drive en mass. All of the files will have the same permissions. All of the directories will have the same permissions.

Read the man page for the mount command. The uid, and gid options affect who the owner and group of the filesystem is. The fmask and dmask options determine what the rights are.

If this isn't a removable device, and you aren't dual booting, don't use a vfat filesystem. If it is an external drive, but you don't move it to a Windows machine, it would make sense to reformat it using a native linux filesystem such as ext3 or xfs.

it turns out that all i needed is to add the nohide option to the subdirectory export on the server and it all worked like a charm.

check man exports, and look for the nohide option flag.