NFS being removed from 10.7 Lion?

[Zoran]

Hi all,

According to some rumours:
(http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/03/24/
inside_mac_os_x_10_7_lion_apple_drops_ftp_adds_webdav_file_sharing_for_ios.html)

--------------

Inside Mac OS X 10.7 Lion: Apple drops FTP, adds WebDAV file sharing
for iOS

By AppleInsider Staff
Published: 06:00 PM EST

The upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion and Lion Server dramatically
simplifies file sharing, removing official support for FTP and Sun's
NFS file sharing protocols while adding a new WebDAV option making it
easy to share files with iOS devices.

-------------

Should we care?

Cheers
Zoran

[wby...@fadingred.com]

It looks like they're removing support for configuring NFS server on Lion. I don't have access to the machine that I installed 10.7 on right now, but I'll try to personally check on sometime next week (unless someone else can confirm).

KFS just uses the NFS client support from the OS — it runs its own server. I doubt the ability to connect to NFS servers will be removed from the client version of OS X any time soon. (In 10.6 the FTP implementation is based around NFS.) It's still possible, but I'd say unlikely.

KFS can also be updated to use other file sharing that the client version of Mac OS X supports. Alternatives that could be implemented include AFP, FTP, and WebDAV. None of these would necessarily be technically better, but are alternatives if NFS support is removed.

Whitney Young
FadingRed
wby...@fadingred.com
www.fadingred.com

[wby...@fadingred.com]

I did some testing with Lion today (the DP1) and found that there was only one minor problem with KFS. When mounting volumes in /Volumes/, the Finder would hang. I've fixed the issue and the results are on bitbucket.

It seems that the Lion NFS implementation expects that the portmap daemon is running at some point which caused the hang. The change I made ensures that the portmap daemon gets started, but registers an NFS service under version number 999 to ensure that we don't harm anyone who's really trying to run an NFS server. I also submitted a bug report to Apple in hopes that they're remove the need to have the portmap daemon running (since it's not technically required).

Whitney Young
FadingRed
wby...@fadingred.com
www.fadingred.com

[Jeff Mancuso]

Whitney - 

I'm curious, do KFS mounted volumes show up in the finder sidebar?

-Jeff

[wby...@fadingred.com]

No, they don't. They fall under the Finder category of connected servers (so they'll appear on the desktop with your settings configured properly).

Whitney Young
FadingRed
wby...@fadingred.com
www.fadingred.com

[wby...@fadingred.com]

With the DP2, it looks like they fixed the issue that caused the Finder to hang.

There's still a quirk with it, though, so I'm going to leave my previous fix in place. The quirk is that the Finder will not display the mounted volume for about 10 seconds after the mount unless portmap is running. I'm guessing that connecting to portmap times out and then things continue.

We'll see what happens in the upcoming releases.

Whitney Young
FadingRed
wby...@fadingred.com
www.fadingred.com

[wby...@fadingred.com]

After receiving a response to the bug that I submitted to Apple, I have updated the previous Lion fix. The solution suggested by an Apple engineer was to simply pass the NFSMNT_NOQUOTA option when mounting. This is a new option on Lion, and passing this as an option resolves the issues seen in DP2 where the Finder would not show the mounted volume for a while. This solution is better than the previous solution because it does not require KFS to use the portmap service. The updates are on Bitbucket.

Cheers,

Whitney Young
FadingRed
wby...@fadingred.com
www.fadingred.com