help request re. NFS on FreeNAS and connecting from various Windows/MAC flavors

[vivek]

Hi,
I posted this on the install forum and no response, hoping that some kind soul will please help me with getting FreeNAS running as I desire it...

I have two users, Admin (777 access) and consumer (555 access, read permission only, cannot modify any file, pure consumer). The dataset is set up as follows:

/mnt/volume/video
/mnt/volume/photos

NFS is enabled to share first one as "video" and the second as "photos" (of course no double quotes, all lower case to avoid incompatibility due to case). For the life of me, I cannot see the files either under Windows XP or Windows 7. I have not even tried MAC yet. Read the manuals, but no luck. Would appreciate it if someone can please tell me what the GUI should show re. permission in the dataset/NFS share etc. Of course, I have enabled NFS in the services. Please...

Thanks,
Vivek

 

[jgreco]

XP has NFS capabilities?

What happens if you try sharing with CIFS?

fwiw, OS X does support NFS but you have to be a bit careful, file locking doesn't work correctly last I checked.

 

[vivek]

Thanks for the response. I installed SFU to get the NFS capabilities under XP SP3. For OS X it would be read only NO writes, so that would be acceptable. Any other suggestions? I have NOT tried CIFS yet, but not sure about that, single threaded (CIFS) vs. NFS re. performance. Not sure if CIFS does MAC OS also.

Thanks

 

[jgreco]

For OS X, under NFS, advanced mount parameters, we use "resvport,nolocks,locallocks,intr,soft,wsize=32768,rsize=32768" and life is good except for the lack of locking. A quick read performance test yielded 39MB/sec via NFS, but the server was busy with a scrub and there's several switches, an IP router (not a NAT), and a firewall between them so maybe not a real fair test.

OS X apparently supports CIFS but I can't easily test it because there's firewalls between the Macs and the storage subnets. I do recall seeing it at some point in the past. No promises as to how well it works, but then you should also know that I generally hate all file sharing on the Mac. AFP is the Apple Fail Protocol; if you use it, you lose fast user switching and other conveniences. NFS suffers locking issues. CIFS I just hate on general principle.