I have some NFS shares on a server (say Desktop) to which the client
(Notebook) is not allways connected to. Even the server is not allways up.
To mount an NFS share in the past, I had some Device-Link icons on my KDE3
desktop. That worked fine.
Now, SUSE 11.2 comes with KDE4. The NFS shares are properly configured in
/etc/fstab as usual (including ‘users’ option). And now the big question:
What is the official way to mount my NFS share on demand as an ordinary
user?
Desktop icons are not KDE4ish. And the Device-Link method doesn’t work
either, because it apparently doesn’t take care of /etc/fstab (i.e. the
users option) and insists on root privileges.
Also Dolphin is not able to mount NFS shares when I need it because it
simply does not show them.
The only way to mount my shares is to perform the mount command in a
terminal session. But this couldn’t be the truth with KDE4, isn’t it?
Why not tell the client to mount the NFS shares at boot? If they’re not there, they will simply not be mounted.
I manage a company network with some laptop users, that want the NFS shares mounted as soon as they are in the office. This does the job. Haven’t had the time, but it would be easy to write a simple script to be executed at boottime, which tests the availability of the server, then mounts based on results.
> Why not tell the client to mount the NFS shares at boot?
Because at boot time of the client, the NFS server may be down. If I need to
share some data I start the server and mount the shares at the client (that
is what I meant as ‘on demand’).
It’s just a home network, one desktop PC and one notebook as client.
> If they’re not there, they will simply not be mounted.
Sure. But there should be a way to mount the shares if the server was not
available at boot time but now it is.
> I manage a company network with some laptop users, that want the NFS
> shares mounted as soon as they are in the office. This does the job.
Yes, in a company network I usually could rely on the availability of the
NFS server. But I have a different scenario and that never made difficulties
since KDE1.
> Haven’t had the time, but it would be easy to write a simple script to
> be executed at boottime, which tests the availability of the server,
> then mounts based on results.
Sure, but this seems to be a huge step backwards in respect to usability.
Such a powerfull desktop environment, as KDE4 claims to be, should be able
to mount network directories on users demand (as all other popular desktop
environments are capable of).
i was looking for the same feature cause dolphin seems to be able to find unmounted hard drive and mount on demand but it wont do the same for nfs shares.
but i tend to use krunner a lot so i just made scripts that so all i have to do is bring up krunner and run mountnfs or umountnfs.
it is just 2nd nature to me now cuase i have krunner bound to alt+space instead of alt+f2 so it works more like quicksliver or kataplt. and it quick.
I think that KDE4 is not as smart as KDE3 in this respect.
I do this on my laptops using the mount option “bg” in fstab. This “backgrounds” the mount attempt if the server is not there at boot time. It retries periodically to mount the exported nfs filesystem.
You can change the retry time using the “retry=n” mount option.
Don’t forget to make a feature request on the KDE bug tracker if noone else has done so yet.
If functionality is missing that did exists in KDE3 I’d assume the developers would be interested in adding it to KDE4 as well.
I seem to have little difficulty with NFS shares. I’ve all my music on my homeserver and mount it on my laptop as a NFS share and if I yank the power cable out of the router and plug it back in it usually just keep playing without an interruption. (Song is cached/buffered/whatever and router boots fast enough/NFS seems to automount)
When I do run into problems I usually execute mount -a as root. (Do note: I’ve no idea about how saf/unsafe it is to do that…)
But now that I’ve read “mountnfs” above I’ll give that a try next time.