Help with NFS and Mac OSX 10.7 (Lion)

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andrema2

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Aug 3, 2011
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I'm new to Mac world and to FreeNas. I have setup a FreeNas (8.0.1 b4) to act as my NAS at home. The idea is to use NFS and access it from my iMac and Mac Mini. I don't need control over what is accessible from either machine since the idea is that both should see the same thing (movies, music and some other files).

I have create the volume and create a user as indicated by http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/NFS_Shares. I used the maproot option. Then I tried to mount the drive on Mac using http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/apple-mac-osx-nfs-mount-command-tutorial/ the GUI part. The problem is that when I use Finder to go to the folder, it says that the folder can't be found and then it creates a folder locally which doesn't seems to be in the NAS at all.

What am I doing wrong ? If you need more information let me know. Since I'm new to this I don't know exactly what information is need to troubleshoot it.
 

aparmley

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Aug 6, 2011
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I'm learning as well, so I'm not expert. However, I am curious why NFS share? why not choose AFP share to be compatible with Mac OS?

perhaps the answer will get some communication flowing?

Also, after you make the share, don't forget to actually enable the service you are wanting to use to make it available...;)
 

andrema2

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Aug 3, 2011
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Hi,

I was able to share it eventually. I don't know what it was, but I solved it. I chose NFS because I understood it would be faster even in Macs.
 

jgreco

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May 29, 2011
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NFS isn't necessarily faster on Macs, but it does allow you to use the Apple "Fast User Switching" feature, whatever they call it.

Unfortunately, Lion doesn't readily support NFS for things like user homes, and probably other stuff. I was able to NFS mount our servers from the command line, but it seemed to me that Apple's "it just works" philosophy doesn't currently include NFS. There's probably ways to make it happen, but expect to have to work at it a bit.

Or use AFP. Which is also conveniently "broken" under Lion, or, rather, they've made the current security model incompatible with the commonly available netatalk that everyone uses, so you either have to tweak Lion or upgrade netatalk.

I've deemed Lion a train wreck for interop purposes and nearly unusable for the purposes one normally uses a client OS for. Very unfortunate.
 

aparmley

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Aug 6, 2011
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I'm running FreeNAS with a AFP share and Lion on 3 macs. It works great; certainly isn't broken. I haven't had any problems other than when I forgot to actually enable AFP after creating my AFP share.

It was my understanding that the big feature of AFP is that it supports the auto discovery protocol used by macs to automatically add shared resources to finder... At least, that's why I use it.

As far as speeds are concerned, I can't comment to NFS share speeds; However, I've peaked out at 389.6Mb/s (48.7MB/s) transfer rates across a wired Gbit [Airport Extreme Router + Cat6 cables] (1000Mb/s or 125MB/s) network running the AFP service. I think that is pretty good. I believe it's about twice as fast as transferring files to a USB 2.0 drive. I suspect my data transfer rate is governed by some hardware limitation of my freeness box, an older P4 machine circa 2004; but thats just a guess. I can move a 4GB file in less than a 2 minutes which suggests the AVG data rate was closer to 37MB/s. When I am reading from my FreeNAS box I can only copy from it to my iMac at about 27-30MB/s. There is a bit information on my AFP speeds incase you get curious about your NFS speeds.
 
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