OSX and NFS issues

When I need access to network services on my computers in my home/studio network, I usually set them up on GNUlinux and grant the other operating systems access as clients. This time, for several reasons, I had to set up my OS X machine to export an NFS directory as a server and I needed to access this directory from GNUlinux. Now, this shouldn’t be a problem (in theory…).

In practice it took me four hours before I found helpful information at the very bottom of this page. A UFS formatted disk under OS X and shared with NFS can be mounted but not accessed from Linux. The solution is to “downgrade” to NFS2 when mounting the exported directory.

I can swear would I have done it thhe other way around, exporting directories in GNUlinux and mounting them in OS X it would have taken me no more than 15 minutes. Instead I ended up spending the better portion of my day resolving this issue. It’s good to be reminded of the reasons for leaving Mac behind…