Now, with the music streaming capabilities in place, there were still some problems that needed fixing. The first one was where to get the MP3 files from. Ok, I could have copied them to the Sun but since I already have a MP3 library available on the network, why waste precious disk space? So I decided to get the files from my trusted file server using NFS.
Mounting an NFS share from Linux on the Sun
Mounting an NFS share should prove to be easy for both systems support NFS4. Or at least they say so. Whatever. My first tries using the Sun Management Console failed. It would let me enter the host to connect to but then the software insisted that there was an error and no exported NFS shares could be found. Since other machines using Linux and Mac OS X could connect to the exported file system just fine I tried to connect manually using the command line. This resulted in an error message that contained just two words: “not owner”. Wow. Very helpful, thank you. Of course the account I was using (root) was the owner of the directory where the shared file system should have been mounted. So I did a bit of googling and found that I wasn’t alone with that particular problem. To get it solved you have to force Solaris to use version 3 of the NFS protocol instead of version4:
# mount -F nfs -o vers=3 mad.whocares.home:/data/Musik /mnt/music
Where exactly the problem lies with NFS 4 I didn’t investigate.
Most interestingly, even after manually mounting the file system it wouldn’t show up in the list of mounted directories displayed by the SMC. Since I now knew how to manually mount an NFS share, I wanted to make this solution a bit more permanent. On Linux you’d edit /etc/fstab. Solaris 10 on the Sun uses /etc/vfstab which also has this format:
# source device fsck device mount point fs type fsck @boot optionsmad:/data/Musik - /mnt/music nfs - yes ro,vers=3
So the order of the parameters is quite different from what one may be used to on Linux.
Mounting an NFS share from the Sun on Linux
Since I had managed to get NFS working in one direction I obvioulsy wanted to try the other direction, too. To make this happen I first had to create a directory which later should be exported and tell Solaris to make it available via NFS. This proved to be very easy, for all it took was one simple command:
# share -F nfs -o rw -d “Testdir on the Sun” /export/test
No more editing of /etc/exports, no more running of exportfs -a. Nice. If you want to limit access to certain hosts and certain types of access, you just give the command like this:
# share -F nfs -o rw=<host1>,ro=<host2> -d “Some Description” /some/dir
Mounting the share from the Linux side was no problem at all. You’d just mount the exported directory like you would from every other NFS server running Linux. Why it works using NFS4 this way but not the other, I really don’t know.
What about benchmarks?
Naturally, I wanted to run some benchmarks to compare the performance provided by the NFS server on the Sun to some other machines on my network. However, although there *are* some benchmarks out there that provide a lot of information, all of them have a common flaw: They take a loooooong time to run. Since I’m not in the office tomorrow anyway, I intend to run them in the morning and collect the results in the evening. So don’t expect any NFS benchmarking results before the day after tomorrow.
[ All posts about my experiences with the SunFire T2000 >>> ]
What is the news about the share command?
It has been there already a very long time, but the sharing is done if the machine is rebooted, iirc.
If you want to permanently share the filesystems, you have to issue the share commands on every boot, which can be done by editing /etc/dfs/dfstab and place the appropriate share commands there.
Ingo, as you may recall, I haven’t had *any* contact with Solaris until very recently. And I haven’t seen any share command on Linux yet. Thus, to me it’s existance was indeed pleasant news. To temporarily share a directory, the share command is *way* easier to use than editing the configs as you’re required to on Linux. But then, maybe I’m just using the wrong Linux distributions.
And yes, you are right. In case I wanted to share the directory permanently (which I don’t) I’d have to put the very same command into /etc/dfs/dfstab. Which btw again is a lot nicer than the syntax Linux expects.