making the easy difficult

By basd on May 6, 2009 | In kde4, linux, opensuse

Transitions can be difficult, even if the actual task itself is not "difficult" in the context of knowing what to do. I decided it was time to share an external USB drive via NFS.

...

Since I was historically using windows machines, I always had my backup hard drives attached to my aging windows machines. File sharing can be unduly difficult (at least for me) and once I got the hang of it I did not wish to learn it all over again. Especially as there are security ramifications. Such as, I do not want to inadvertently share my music collection with the entire internet. I'm pretty certain RIAA would not view that in the most positive light.

But, as I find less and less reason to actually use (and maintain) a dedicated windows machine, it seemed fairly necessary to learn to share drives via NFS.

Or not.

Because, here's the thing. (As though I know what I am talking about.) Windows/Samba shares do not work the same way as Linux/NFS shares.

Naturally, I bumbled around and nothing would work right. As it turns out, the difficulties were mostly minor mistakes -- the tools aren't that difficult, at least if you do it correctly.

But, I experimented with several versions of doing it incorrectly before getting it right.

Using YAST tools from OpenSUSE, in combination with the KDE 4 filesharing tools was actually pretty straightforward.

Here's the thing, though. Apparently, NFS does not allow permission inheritance the way the Samba system does.

Basically, with my CIFS shares, once the drives are connected, if I dump a file on the shared drive, it's read/writable by my other computers.

Whereas, new files default to "read-only" for everyone but the file owner in the conventional linux file system. That means the other computer can read the file but it can't modify it. Or I can have my user default to giving r/w privileges for ALL files I create, but I don't want that either. What I want is ... that he files in a specific directory be readable by whichever computer accesses them.

Which is rather inconvenient for maintaining a set of documents that can be edited on either of two machines, for instance.

So, now the question I need to answer is whether to do all the shares via Samba -- which means they should work the same way they have always worked -- or do I re-educate myself and do it in NFS?

There's this additional question: what happens if I sync a windows share directory with an NFS one?

At one point I set up a synchronization between an SSHFS file share and a windows file share and I didn't run into any specific problems. But, I didn't use it enough to determine whether I was creating issues or not. I was using "PowerFolders" which is a pretty neat program that runs in the background. Unfortunately, it had the annoying habit of deleting all of my files when the remote drive was not actually connected. It would look at the mount directory, see that it was empty, and decide I had intentionally deleted all of the files.

Not good. And then they sort of "un-open-sourced-it." I guess the source code itself remained "open source," but the version a novice such as myself might use required an out-of-pocket expenditure.

Nevertheless, I liked the way it functioned and did install a fully licensed version on a client's computer. Other solutions (such as Unison) are rather time consuming to run, whereas PowerFolders runs in the background and keeps the mirror current.

I also ran into a problem with Unison not working correctly on the client's setup. I was uncertain what was going wrong, but Unison was definitely not working -- although it has typically worked fine on my own install. But, the experience did shake my confidence in Unison; and also, Unison is pretty slow to run once you start having a few gigabytes to synchronize, even if the number of actually changed files is small.

So ... I'm not certain how all this is going to shake out.

Thank you for visiting and have a pleasant tomorrow.