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I'm a big geek, serial entrepreneur and idea guy. I've been called names, such as PHP Guru, MySQL DBA, BOFH, Security God, etc. That and Peter-Peter-Pumpkin-Eater.

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SimpleShare NAS does NFS on OSX 7x faster than SMB

Tuesday 03 April 2007 at 12:58 pm

I got a MacBook Pro in December 2006 and have been quite happy with it. I have a SimpleTech SimpleShare NAS on my network that holds my MP3s, documents, photos, etc. I had been using SMB/CIFS to connect to the SimpleShare drive, but I read somewhere that CIFS is slower than NFS, and I wanted to try. SimpleTech has instructions for how to connect from an OSX box, so I figured it would be easy.

Trouble is that the SimpleShare documentation mentions NFS once, but doesn’t say how it works. Gack. Google to the rescue.

Click to read on.

I tried all sorts of commands:

mount 192.168.0.20:/NetFolder /private/mnt
mount_nfs: can’t access /NetFolder: Permission denied
mount 192.168.0.20:/share/NetFolder /private/mnt
mount_nfs: can’t access /share/NetFolder: Permission denied
etc…

to no avail. So I googled a few times, finally falling upon this blog and reading:

“With the SimpleShare, you have to add the prefix /shares/PoolName for NFS access.”

OK, great. I tried mounting 192.168.0.20:/shares/NetFolder but that didn’t work. I kept google searching. That link came up again, so I read it again. And again. And again. Then I read it again. PoolName. Oh. You mean the Pool that share is in?

mount 192.168.0.20:/shares/SimplePool/NetFolder /private/mnt mount_nfs: /private/mnt: Operation not permitted

Sweet! A new error message to google! This lead me to this blog where a helpful comment was posted:

“Thanks a lot for posting this hack. It worked great for me, but only after I modified the NFSvolumes script very slightly. I was getting Operation not permitted. So I googled some and found that because most Linux systems require the use of a reserved port for NFS mounting, I had to change this line:
/sbin/mount_nfs $rvol /NFS/$ldir to this: /sbin/mount_nfs -P $rvol /NFS/$ldir

Could it be that easy?

mount_nfs -P 192.168.0.20:/shares/SimplePool/NetFolder /private/mnt

YES!!! Whoohoo!!! Success. My SimpleShare NAS is now connected to my OSX MBP via NFS. Wicked. And it is indeed faster!

ls -la via SMB/CIFS
Time spent in user mode (CPU seconds) : 0.013s
Time spent in kernel mode (CPU seconds) : 0.080s
Total time : 0:09.51s
CPU utilisation (percentage) : 0.9%

ls -la via NFS
Time spent in user mode (CPU seconds) : 0.017s
Time spent in kernel mode (CPU seconds) : 0.027s
Total time : 0:01.27s
CPU utilisation (percentage) : 2.3%

NFS is 7.488x FASTER than SMB/CIFS on OSX!! Damn. Always use NFS. Stupid Samba.

Used tags: macbook_pro, nas, nfs, osx, simpleshare

five comments

I have about the same setup (my laptop is a bit older, PPC G4) but NFS does not work at all for me. Were there any setup steps that I may have missed that lead to your success but were not mentioned above? Any help you could offer would be most appreciated.

Thanks,
the Ringo
The Ringo (Email) - 21 04 07 - 18:28

Sweet! I’ve been fighting to get Ubuntu and the SimpleShare talking for about 90 minutes. The fully qualified path (/shares/Simpleshares…) was the piece I was missing. With Samba, I didn’t need that.
COD (Email) (URL) - 18 05 07 - 20:59

I have the same setup but I am still getting an error. If I want to mount the folder “media” from my Simpleshare, what would the exact command be? The last error I got said there was no such file or directory as /private/mnt. Do I need to create this somewhere first?
Doug Phelps (Email) - 01 07 07 - 13:04

@Ringo: Not that I know of, but I don’t have a PPC — the differences between OSX on the Intel vs PPC may be your issue. Sure you’re using a fully qualified path?

@COD: Glad my post helped!

@Doug: Check to see if /private/mnt actually exists! It should be a directory you create for mounting stuff. I can’t recall if I created it myself or not, but it does need to exist, since you are mounting the drive there. Make an empty directory in your home dir named “mnt”, then run this: mount_nfs -P 192.168.0.20:/shares/SimplePool/NetFolder /Users/doug/mnt

Make sure the NetFolder is the name of the share.
[beckman] (URL) - 13 09 07 - 00:41

Great hint. Some Freebsd server setups require the -P flag as well. My thanks.
jon livesey (Email) - 17 04 08 - 18:45

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