Re: NFS Support in Nautilus

[wlach mars net-itech com]

Quoting Evil Kosh <evil_kosh_uk yahoo co uk>:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm not sure whether this question has been asked before cause I'm new 
> to this list and I've not seen it anywhere, but where is the NFS support 
> in Nautilus gone?
> 
> nfs://
> 
> results in "is not a valid location"
> 
> checking out gnome-vfs-2.0 also reveals that there is no NFS module and 
> there is nothing configured, it's actually commented out.
> 
> Why is NFS support disabled? SMB support is there, but it's unreliable 
> on this network, whether it's a software or hardware thing, it's still 
> annoying not to be able to share files using gnome properly, yes, I know 
> I could just mount them, but I dont want to do that, konqueror works 
> fine, so it's not a problem with my system otherwise it would affect 
> konq too.

See this mailing list message:
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-vfs-list/2003-June/msg00006.html

I'm not quite sure what Alex means by "pretty silly", but some things 
that come to mind:

- the method needs to acquire a privileged port, which is potentially insecure
- pretty much impossible (AFAIK) to reliably create a list of potential servers
to connect to
- NFS's "security model" results in counter-intuitive permissions when browsing
(unless you're really careful about setting uids)
- Have to assemble a hierarchical filesystem out of a list of mounts, which
can lead to unexpected results (see:
http://bugzilla.ximian.com/show_bug.cgi?id=47633)

I haven't personally tried konq's NFS browser, although I really can't
imagine a way around the above design issues. 

> Also NFS is faster, I've got that unix services for windows installed on 
> the other machines here and I get around 6.5MB/sec out of NFS, yet I get 
> around 3->4MB/sec outta SM.

This doesn't change the fact that NFS sucks. ;-) O.k., seriously, it is useful
for some things. I still don't think a GNOME-VFS method is a good idea.

P.S.: if anyone _is_ using XD2's NFS method, I have some (rather ugly) patches
against it which fix various issues I've experienced in my work environment. I
haven't bothered cleaning them up and submitting them because, well, it doesn't
seem worth my time. E-mail me privately if you're interested in them.

William Lachance
wlach nit ca