Re: NFS Support in Nautilus

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sat, 2004-01-24 at 16:50, wlach mars net-itech com wrote:
> 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.

I have been approached about updating the nfs method code in gnome-vfs
(which doesn't work atm) to the XD2 code, with the idea that if there is
some code out there, we should make it the most tested, most working
version. However, I'm not for enabling it by default, for much the same
reasons you stated above.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a superhumanly strong misogynist waffle chef plagued by the memory of his 
family's brutal murder. She's an artistic tomboy widow who believes she is the 
reincarnation of an ancient Egyptian queen. They fight crime!