Tuesday, March 25, 2008

Teaching Myself New Linux Tricks: NFS

Between my surprise middle school teaching job, catching and hosting four different upper respiratory viruses, and having my elderly eMac melt down, my blogging has been sorely neglected, and the home computer activities I've engaged in have not been of the most enjoyable sort.

I usually try to convince myself that reconfiguring my computers is an exciting learning opportunity, but I'm quite resistant to this project: setting up a Network File System on my new Linux machine and the Mac mini. I tried to teach myself this new trick several years ago, and finally just settled for using the old eMac as a file transfer protocol (ftp) server. Whenever I wanted to transfer files from one machine to the other, I just ftp'd from the command line, the way I learned during the Carter administration.

For some reason, the Mac mini is slow as molasses in January at connecting to the Linux box via ftp. It's just not a satisfactory system anymore, and, besides, I feel ashamed to be running a Unix network without knowing how to set up NFS. That's why I'm slowly rereading portions of Running Linux, and perusing Web resources such as these:

I still haven't got it working. It may have to wait until Spring break, when I can fret over it for several consecutive days.

2 comments:

Larry said...

I can easily commiserate with you. Some of those Unixy Linux things are just hard to learn. And what really annoys me is that I'll learn some elaborate procedure which makes life so much easier, but then I won't need it for a year or two. The need recurs and I will have forgotten the arcane steps needed. Oh, well, it helps keep the mind sharp!

Anonymous said...

This article may not help for MAC boxes, but it looks like it may be helpful for Gnu/Linux file sharing with that operating system coming from Redmond, WA: How to Properly Setup Samba, Create Public Shares and Anonymously Browse Windows Shares on GNU/Linux: "see how to setup Samba and how to get both Windows and GNU/Linux sharing and browsing public share the right way."