The Empirical Manifesto

Leopard has changed many things. They're moving away from BSD and embracing a more POSIX outlook. Imagine my surprise when ps -aux returned an error and ps -aef worked instead. Remember all the frustration I had with trying to export an OSX filesystem to my Solaris box several years ago? Considering OSX has dumped that horrific NetInfo GUI for a more standardized /etc/exports approach since 10.5, I was certain I would be immediately successful in mounting my 500GB FAT32 USB drive from OSX to ubuntu via NFS.

I was wrong:

mount.nfs: access denied by server while mounting 192.168.0.3:/Volumes/500GB

ehowtons-mac-mini /sbin/nfsd[65]: Can't export /Volumes/500GB: Operation not supported (45)

Nothing I have tried has worked, and I've been at it nearly seven hours. There are a ton of resources online for how to mount ubuntu to OSX, but only a single one for the other way around. Not that it would matter, of course. NFS is NFS, and since the 'Operation' is 'not supported' I'm looking at going deeper. Some kernel-module switch flipped off perhaps. Here's the sole OSX NFS posting online which keeps showing up. I want to physically harm the person who posted it:

Setting up NFS exports under Leopard is insanely easy: just add an entry to (or more usually, create) /etc/exports, and it gets picked up automatically. This file survives reboots, as well; pretty cool.

Here's an example:
muse:~ root# cat /etc/exports
/Volumes/BigDisk/Panic -maproot=netroot 10.0.1.1
muse:~ root# showmount -e
Exports list on localhost:
/Volumes/BigDisk/Panic 10.0.1.1
muse:~ root#

"Insanely easy."

OSX 10.4 Tiger is not an ideal operating system in which to run an NFS server. Well, at least not yet. I suppose that I'll continue to try and find the /exports syntax (or whatever it is this ex-BSD platform uses) but in the meantime, I did find a step-by-step guide which had me bring up, of all things, a GUI.

*le sigh*

The GUI was more difficult to understand than any command line I've used (outside of, let's say AIX *eyeroll*) and in the end I would NOT have been able to accomplish this task without the HOWTO. Either way, bask upon what you would assume would be an easy task -

On my Solaris box:

[root@quark: /]# df -k
Filesystem            kbytes    used   avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d0       33919014 11382953 22196871    34%    /
/proc                      0       0       0     0%    /proc
mnttab                     0       0       0     0%    /etc/mnttab
fd                         0       0       0     0%    /dev/fd
swap                 2506288      24 2506264     1%    /var/run
BorgQueen:/Volumes/iTunes
                     156144848 50469280 105675568    33%    /iTunes

On my mac:

BorgQueen:/ ehowton$ showmount -e
Exports list on localhost:
/Volumes/iTunes                    192.168.1.73 192.168.1.73

So using my Ampache PHP app, I add a new 'catalog' as a local filesystem pointing to my new NFS mount - it sees it, but not the 1251 directories underneath it. Hmmmm. I input the following three words into my Google search: ampache itunes NFS. Guess what the first hit is? My Xanga cross-post blog entry from last week! This could be a long, hard battle.

An Ampache thread in the FAQ validates my claim of NFS issues.

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Anyone know what the unscrambled word for a moth's eye-spots are using the letters 'CCELIRS?' C'mon, I know there's some budding entomologists out there. I couldn't find any reference, and this is supposed to be at a 3rd grade level...