Solaris, NFS & OS X
At home I use ZFS+NFS on a Solaris box to make a file server that
provides disk space to all the other machines at home, which are
mostly MACs. I use NFS to access the files instead of AFS because
it's so much faster. A friend and I were talking about this over
the weekend and he was surprised: OS X is notoriously tricky to
configure to use NFS. They have a nonstandard way to manage
automount maps and, unusual for Apple: no easy-to-use front end. So
lots of folks stay away from using NFS on OSX. It turns out that
there's a trick that not many folks know about that makes it easy:
(almost) no configuration required. The default NFS configuration
contains a default automount map based on hostnames:
/net/
hostname/
filepath. The tricky bit is that the
finder suppresses the "/net" directory so you can only see it from
the Unix shell. From the shell on OS X, /net references work with
no effort:
ls /net/10.0.0.123/tank/photos
Lists all the files in /tank/photos on the host with IP address
10.0.0.123 (if you're feeling adventurous, you can associate a name
with the address by appropriate configuration of the naming
environment, but that can be a pain, so I often just use naked
static addresses). To make this work with finder in OS X, just do
this from the shell:
sudo ln -s /net/10.0.0.123 /tank
Then "tank" will show up on the root filesystem, and "photos" will
be visible within it. The only configuration I do is this one
symlink, then all the filesystems on the server appear. Easy.
