[KLUG Members] Re: Nautilus in RH 7.3 and Samba shares...revisited... -- NIS/LDAP Automounter MAPs, WebNFS ...

[Adam Williams]

>>I agree 99%, but NFS is just a pain for adhoc connections,  one needs
>>to establish a mount/connection for everything one wants to use.  Which is
>>just irritating.  I'm curious if there is anything akin to SMB for
>>browseing/ad-hoc file management for UNIX, other than SMB.
>Remember the UNIX mindset:

I'm a big fan of the UNIX model, but it isn't canonical absolute truth, 
sometimes it is wrong.  See Miquel Icaza's (sp?) paper: "Let's make UNIX
not suck", http://primates.ximian.com/~miguel/bongo-bong.html

>- Filesystems need to be mounted, and only root can mount

If one sets "user" any user can mount/unmount.  We use that on laptops, 
the NFS volume can be mounted/unmounted via the GNOME background and a
right click.

>- Network resources should _always_ be listed in a  directory service.

Right, but the problem is they need to be listed twice.  Once in exports
to make them available, and again for the client (whether in a file,
NIS, or LDAP).  And mount points need to pre-exist.  Thats just isn't
what I'd call adhoc.  Structured mapping/assignment is generally a good
thing,  but there are some situations where it is too much of a pain.

Maybe WebDAV is the way to go for this?  I don't have much experience
with it or any idea what the current level of support in VFS is,  but I
bump into the term an awful lot lately.  Any WebDAV gurus out there?
 
>Furthermore, Sun _did_ create a "browser client model" for what it called
>"WebNFS" to connect to an NFS service on port 2049 (no server modification

I remember this vaguely,  I think the adoption rate has been pretty
low.  It isn't mentioned in any of the Linux manual pages or anywhere in
the kernel sourcecode. (cd /usr/src/linux; grep -d recurse -i webnfs *)

>required, assuming the share is "world-readable").  Several applications _can_
>now browse NFS shares without mounting.  I know there are now several "NFS
>browsers."  Try "nfs://" in your browser.

"nfs is not a registered protocol"