Jason Sidabras

So I finally set up a NFS server on OpenBSD to share my videos and music to the MacMini that occupies my television-land space. I’m still dabbling into what programs to use to view the media with. Currently I am using either built-in FrontRow with the Perian plugin for Quicktime, enabling a major slew of video formats. The other program that I have been dabbling with (major beta right now) is iTheater which looks great and has many more options than FrontRow will ever have. I am waiting for the vlc plugin and then I will mainly run iTheater exclusively. The only problem is with the iTunes movie rentals, but I’m debating getting into Netflix.

On to the problem at hand.

Enabling NFS in OpenBSD was a cinch. Using the networking faq for OpenBSD it was easily a mater of turning the services on, editing the /etc/exports file and restarting the server. A simple test on the server connected the shared directory perfectly. So on to OSx.

Here’s where the fun began. I jumped on the command line and typed the command needed to mount a NFS drive:

So what does this mean? Well some google searching and some verbose options states that it doesn’t have permission to my client path. Checking permissions, creating new directories changing owners… no avail.

The last resort I had was to go to a gui program called NFSMount, which the best it could do was to mount in finder then simlink to the folder you wanted. This doesn’t work well for iTunes or other programs.

Luckily one more google search later I found the command line option to fix the NFS woes.

The -P option reserves a port and it seems the OpenBSD NFS server needs this to properly mount a NFS drive. So after searching through a bunch of archives were people made fun of others using `mount_nfs` instead of `mount -t nfs` pays off for the “noobs”. Because `mount -t nfs` doesn’t have a -P option.

Hope this helps someone else in the future.

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