Accessing Network Shares

Network shares some in two main forms. NFS[en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_File_System] and CIFS[www.samba.org/cifs/].

AutoFS

AutoFS is a simple means of mounting an external network share automatically when its required.

This method means that hard mounting in the fstab can be avoided such that if a share is not availalble at boot no errors are thrown.

Installing autoFS

sudo apt-get install autofs

Configure autoFS

Installation will create a configuration file /etc/auto.master. Edit this file and add a link to a seperate file.

sudo nano /etc/auto.master

add the following at the end of the file.

/media/nfsshares /etc/auto.<fileservername> --ghost

where <fileservername> is then name of your fileshare server. make sure there's a return at the end of the line.

Create /etc/auto.<fileservername>

sudo nano /etc/auto.<fileservername>

add the local share folder name and the remote server address and location in the form

<localfolder> <server address>:/<server folder>

if you have numerous shares in the same tree, you can add something like this * 192.168.0.8:/myshareroot/&

Test autoFS

first we need to restart the service

sudo service autofs restart

You should see

Stopping automount: done.
Starting automount: done.

Navigate to the local share location, for example cd /media/nfsshares/music

List the contents of the directory to check its mounted, a brief delay as the folder is mounted may be expected depending on you network configuration.

cd /media/nfsshares/music
ls

You should see a list of all the remote files.

If you get errors like 'directory not found', check your auto.master config.

Raspbian / Raspbmc

Problem

After installation and setup autofs doesn't work and access to an NFS directory results in

No such file or directory

this can be fixed by manually starting rpcbind

sudo service rpcbind start
[sudo] password for jack: 
[ ok ] Starting rpcbind daemon....

However, I haven't been able to wok out how to get rpcbind to start on a reboot.

sudo sysv-rc-conf

shows that the runlevels should be ok. Set for 2,3,4,5. So there's still something wrong somewhere. At least a manual start gets the NFS shares up!