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Bluebill
Asked: 2012-04-30 03:49:57 +0800 CST

Mount NFS share as a shortcut

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I recently purchased a Netgear ReadyNas and have a question about mounting an NFS volume. Firstly I know how to mount the share in fstab. There is a lot of information around that describes how to do that. I really don't want to do that.

What I want to do is have a shortcut or launcher that I can execute which will mount the nfs share for me (for example mounting it to ~/music). When I plug in a usb drive xubuntu automatically puts a drive icon shortcut on my desktop and allows me to 'eject'. Is this possible? Does it make sense?

I am using xubuntu 11.10.

I have been doing research to solve this problem and I have come up with two possibilities:

1) Create a shell script or

2) AutoFS.

I am not sure which is better. I am more comfortable with shell scripting than AutoFS. The problem with the shell scripting is that I'll need sudo permissions. What I have read about AutoFS it might be the best solution. Is there a way to setup AutoFS so that I can keep the configuration files within the users home folder?

nas xubuntu nfs autofs

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    I'm using Autofs for my NFS network, see this answer.

    Note that :
    autofs is a program for automatically mounting directories on an as-needed basis. Auto-mounts are mounted only as they are accessed, and are unmounted after a period of inactivity. Because of this, automounting NFS/Samba shares conserves bandwidth and offers better overall performance compared to static mounts via fstab.

    I've used an admin account to configure it, and I use it every day with a normal account.

    1st you need to setup your Netgear ReadyNas to act like a server. ( I can not describe this part).

    Then I suppose you can setup Autofs like this:

    • install Autofs

      $ sudo apt-get install autofs

    • create the folder used to mount the connection with your Netgear ReadyNas

      $ sudo mkdir /media/shareFolder

    • set autofs to automatically mount this folder,
      in /etc/auto.master add this line:

      /media/shareFolder /etc/auto.nfs --ghost, --timeout=60

      in /etc/auto.nfs add this line

      Netgear -fstype=nfs,rw,intr,uid=1001,guid=1001   192.168.1.?:/home/something

      with:
      192.168.1.? is the address of your Netgear ReadyNas
      /home/something is the folder shared on your Netgear ReadyNas
      1001 is the normal user (without admin privilege) and group ID. To find it $ id {your normal logon}


    Result should be that your /home/something from your Netgear ReadyNas is mounted in /media/shareFolder/Netgear

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  2. Just create your own script nfsmount.sh and then create a shortcut to it. Tip: Mount it to /media/something not to /mnt if mount to /media it will be displayed in nautilus and launcher. And then create a link from /media/nfsmusic to /home/hhlp/music.

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