[KLUG Members] NFS across platforms...and not!

[Robert G. Brown]

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003 21:26:13 -0500, Chris Goron <chrisg@iserv.net> wrote:

>The "-P" option seems to do the trick for me (X-->Linux anyway):
>mount -o "-P" host:/mnt/exported /mnt/share
>This is mounting a Linux export from a Mac OS X client. Never tried the
>other way around if that's what you trying.

This didn't so a thing for me, other than generate some errors. I"m
going to revisit this early next year (aka Friday! :)

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 02:17:21 -0500, Jason Edward Durrett <jed@shackman.com> wrote:

>OS-X docs are also confusing to me.  I find searching on BSD sites 
>helps to find the solution.
Yes, I agree, this has been useful. it is interesting to see that Apple has a 
lot of BSD reference pages on their developer's website now, and that some of 
them do not document the current behavior exhibited by OS-X (or do they??)...

>If anyone is interested, I can host an OS-X weekend at my company. ...
I would be interested in this.

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 02:59:27 -0500, Chris Goron <chrisg@iserv.net> wrote:

>Nfs hosting from OS X is going to depend on your OS X implementation to
>a certain degree since it seems it's tightly wrapped around Netinfo....
Everything seems to be very highly pitched toward their latest release. I
was UNABLE to get and NFS server working prior to 10.1.3.

>http://astcomm.net/mac/tech/nfs_howto/server/

This is a very instructive page, essentially walks the reader through using 
the NetInfo manager to define exports and test them. I used this to get things
going (finally). Many thanks for this!

>I was able to apply the above instructions and successfully mount my os
>X nfs exports from a Linux computer without applying any "special" mount
>parameters.
Yes, I got this working and was able to mount exports from Linux and an
OS-X 10.2 system with nothing special on the mount commands.

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 09:05:22 -0500, Jamie McCarthy <jamie@mccarthy.vg> wrote:

>Mac OS X Server includes handy GUI tools for managing, among many
>other things, NFS shares.
This functionality is not apparent to someone new to the system, however.
Now that I know where to find (some of) it, I will look back through the
docs to see what or where I missed this.

>If you don't want to spend the $500 for Server, I used this software
>a while ago and it worked reasonably well.  It's fully-functional
>nagware, $15:
>http://www.bresink.de/osx/NFSManager.html
I took a look at this and it's quite nice, actually, and easily worth the
money (actually 15 Euros, which today is about $18, but that is subject 
to foreign exchange rates).

I will probably try it, and if it makes setting up exports easier than the
NetInfo manager GUI, I'll buy it.

At the same time, I am wondering a good deal about the value proposition 
behind buying OS-X server. Mostly, there doesn't seem to be much; perhaps
I'm too much of a techie for it to make sense.

In any case, 10.2.1 of the product seems to be very superficial and short on
configuration tools, other than NetInfo and some LDAP stuff.

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 14:57:32 -0500, Adam Williams <adam@morrison-ind.com> wrote:

>> The "-P" option seems to do the trick for me (X-->Linux anyway):...
>Interesting.  Does "-P" stand for something like "Posix"?

Something like it, if you think "Port" (as in "reserved port") is like 
"Posix".

-P Use a reserved socket port number. This is useful for mounting servers 
  that require clients to use a reserved port number on the mistaken belief
  that this makes NFS more secure. (For the rare case where the client has
  a trusted root account but untrustworthy users and the network cables are
  in secure areas this does help, but for normal desktop clients this does
  not apply.) 

From: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Reference/
           ManPages/html/mount_nfs.8.html

Impressions on NetInfo, LDAP, and configuring these systems....

I do not think NetInfo is directly related to LDAP, although it would not
knock me off my feat if it were a very nice LDAP CLIENT. It is quite clear
that a LOT of stuff on an OS-X box can be configured through NetInfo, whether
or not slapd and friends and actually running....

   - There are explicit controls that activate and deactivate slapd, etc.
     which are completely separate from NetInfo.

   - You can run Netinfo completely w/o OpenLDAP, as I've done on 10.3

   - There is no documented (oh, maybe well-buried) link between NetInfo and
     OpenLDAP.

NetInfo reminds me a lot of the Microsoft RegEdit program; the layout of
things is a bit less deep, and the interface is a bit easier (maybe, and
perhaps a question of taste). But overall, I think the idea is the same.
This is a pity, and somewhat misleading, IMO. In particular, the fact that
Apple carries documentation for some BSD commands, and that the behavior of
these has been modified in undocumented ways has lead to a lot of time
wasted recently. In any case, it seems that Apple may well have done a good
job integrating LDAP into things, but at the moment I've had other concerns.

The Apple documentation is, in general, rather superficial, and way too "gee-
whiz" for my taste. It is rather hard to dig out some clear answers, and 
few of them have come from Apple (although it is clear that they will be,
with a liberal application of money to Apple). This mailing list and my own
experimentation has been as large a factor in learning about the OS-X
environment has been as significant as all the documentation from Apple.

						Regards, and Happy New Year!
							---> RGB <---